Mokka mit Schlag » Software Development

The Firefox password manager mostly works, but they’re a few sites whose passwords it can’t seem to collect or remember no matter what. Del.icio.us is the most prominent. Speakeasy is another.

Does anyone have any idea why this or how to fix it? I’ve confirmed it with Firefox 2 on both Mac and Windows. Possibly these sites are doing something weird with JavaScript. I can’t see anything in the plain HTML that would cause this problem. If they are deliberately blocking the remembering of passwords, I wish they’d stop. It’s very annoying, and will just lead to me choosing a more memorable but much more easily guessable password than the one I use to secure my password vault.

I’ve been working on a mixed language Python-Java project lately. Increasingly I find myself needing to trace into the Python code, and I miss the features of Eclipse when doing so. (Yes, I’ve installed PyDev. No, it isn’t very good.) Are there any IDEs out there that let me do more than syntax color the Python? Since my primary interest is in exploring other people’s code, what I’m really looking for are the browsing features of Eclipse’s Java support. In particular I’d like to be able to click a method name or variable and find out where that is declared. I’d also like to be able to click a definition of a function or class and get a list of references to that item in the project.

This functionality is easily available in Java, and it’s very helpful. Can anything out there in Python-land do this, or is this a place where a dynamically typed language isn’t so helpful? (How would you even know at compile-time which class will be bound to a variable?) I do notice that the Python folks I’m working with eschew IDEs in favor of emacs themselves. Is this the S.O.P for Pythonistas? or for that matter for all dynamically typed languages?

Fowler’s Toad, Bufo woodhousii fowleri
Robert Moses State Park, 2007-07-07

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Anyone know of an equivalent of the SQLAlchemy Python data binding library for Java? SQLAlchemy maps Python classes to the records in a table. What distinguishes it from Java-based ORM tools that I’ve seen such as Hibernate is that in SQLAlchemy you can map any table, not just ones that actually exists in the database.

SQLAlchemy doesn’t view databases as just collections of tables; it sees them as relational algebra engines. Its object relational mapper enables classes to be mapped against the database in more than one way. SQL constructs don’t just select from just tables—you can also select from joins, subqueries, and unions. Thus database relationships and domain object models can be cleanly decoupled from the beginning, allowing both sides to develop to their full potential.

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This site and the other sites hosted on the same Mac Mini (The Cafes,www.xom.nu) were down for about half an hour early this morning.They’re fixed now. The problem was interesting. I was hacking the httpd.conf file to add a new virtual host and I was convinced I’d made a serious error, and I racked my brains trying to spot it. I backed out my changes and the problem still wasn’t fixed. I reverted to backups and the problem wasn’t fixed.

The eventual clue that led me to realize what was happening was that sometimes I’d get weird usage messages from httpd and apachectl. This site is served by Apache 2.0. However Mac OS X ships with Apache 1.3, and that had snuck into my path. I had managed to launch the bundled Apache 1.3 on top of or instead of Apache 2.0, so it was reading different config files completely. For some reason, I couldn’t shut it down. The dual versions were confusing both binaries. I had to restart, but then Apache 2.0 launched and all was goodness.

To avoid this problem in the future, I’m going to rename /usr/sbin/httpd to something less likely to surprise me.

The upside is that once I get this all fixed, I should have some very cool new features I’ve been promising for years, and may finally get working later this weekend. Watch this space.