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October 10, 2007
Installing Oracle and cx_Oracle for Python on MOSX
I'm about to attempt connecting Django applications to an Oracle database. Django's support for Oracle doesn't seem to be official, but I see that it uses cx_Oracle. Looking around for information about installing cx_Oracle, I found the article, "Installing cx_Oracle on Mac OS X", outlining the steps.
It's nice that the author also describes how to install the Oracle instant client for Mac OS X. Personally, I think the people at Oracle should be ashamed for not distributing good installers for all of their client software. The manual process described in this article shouldn't be necessary. Oracle's own download web site describes a process like this, not just for Mac OS X, but in the past I've seen it for the Linux version as well.
The Oracle client for Mac OS X has been years overdue in my opinion. I remember a couple of years in the past, I wanted to install an Oracle OCI client on MOSX so that I could build libraries for Python and PHP, but I couldn't. I could find JDBC drivers that worked fine for Java applications, but nothing native. When Oracle finally did release OCI libraries, they didn't include the *.h files necessary to compile anything against them. When I reported that as a problem, they replied that they would "investigate" it. What's to investigate? We need the *.h files to use the libraries, there are no *.h files in the distribution, therefore you guys screwed up. Just add those include files and lets get on with it already.
So, sadly my experimentation with Oracle on Mac OS X has been on hold for a long time. I have worked on other things in the meantime because I felt it was a waste of time and a frustration trying to get Oracle to work. I knew it would be fixed eventually, but it is disappointing to see that manual installation instructions like this are still necessary.
Cheers to Mr. Salgado and rotten tomatoes to Oracle.
Posted by lsloan at 09:01 AM | Comments (0)
October 04, 2007
Download a Free RoR Book
For a limited time (58 days, 8 hours, 28 minutes, 24 seconds are left as I write this) you can download an entire Ruby on Rails book for free.
Go to Build Your Own Ruby�on�Rails Web�Applications - SitePoint Books, and you can download the entire book as a PDF for free. Don't let the suicidal-looking photo of the author put you off, it seems to be a fairly good book.
To download, you'll have to give them an email address and they'll send you a message with a link to download the book. Or you could just download it directly from http://media.sitepoint.com/books/ror.pdf and save the trouble of giving them your email address, waiting for the message, then possibly receiving marketing email from them in the future.
Enjoy!
Posted by lsloan at 08:34 AM | Comments (0)
October 02, 2007
Eclipse: The Powerful (Yet Fragile) IDE
I have used Eclipse on and off for the past couple of years, but in the last few months I've been using it a lot more. Since I'm starting to work on more JEE (Java Enterprise Edition) web applications, Eclipse is fairly essential.
It seems like a panacea. You have editors, design tools, version control, web browser, server control, and many other features at your disposal in one big complex pocketknife of an application. If you need it to do something that it doesn't already do rright out of the box, you may find an extension that will help you. Many third-party extensions are available. It sounds great!
But what happens when an extension has a bug or conflicts with another extension? The results can be unpredictable and a lot of productive time can be lost.
In my case, as I was new to Eclipse, I loaded mine up with all kinds of cool extensions. Stuff for JEE, sftp, Python, UNIX shells, Subversion, etc. I would occasionally get strange behavior, but the worst came shortly after I installed the Python extension, Pydev, which I'm sorry to say, because I love Python. It would cause Eclipse UI failures when I was running my JEE applications.
I thought disabling or uninstalling the Pydev extension would solve the problems. That didn't help. Switching my JEE applications to a new "workspace" didn't help, either. I ended up having to reinstall Eclipse. At that time, I used only the few extensions I needed for JEE, the standard ones plus Subclipse (for Subversion). I wasn't sure that Python was the culprit at that time, though, since I had a lot of extensions installed.
I recently reinstalled Pydev in my controlled environment, and problems came back. By this point, I had gotten used to installing each extension in individual directories, by giving a specific directory for each one. In theory, that would make it easy to disable extensions or to reinstall them with new installations of Eclipse. It doesn't work out quite that well in practice.
I found that even disabling an extension location didn't solve the problems. Apparently the bugs or conflicts with Pydev have "infected" the Eclipse installation itself. I think I may need to do the same as one of my colleagues does: install a copy of Eclipse for each development environment. In my case, one for JEE, one for Python, and one for supporting the legacy WebObjects applications that I need to support.
This is very disappointing.
Posted by lsloan at 03:52 PM | Comments (1)
Download StuffIt Expander
I wonder why Smith Micro Software makes people report their name, their company's name, and their email address to download StuffIt Expander. All they do is send an email with a URL that refers browsers to this page where the program can be downloaded: StuffIt Expander: Free file expansion.
In fact, I bet anybody could just use that URL to download StuffIt Expander without the silly little "registration".
Posted by lsloan at 01:25 PM | Comments (0)