After looking around for alternatives, it looks like IPython will be a good upgrade. But one problem, the installation documentation was way too verbose and complex, so I’ve tried to simplify it here:

1. Install readline — you need readline to use all the fancy command line edit features, like advanced history and auto completion. You need to install a new version because apparently the version shipped with OS X will not work properly with IPython. Luckily for you there is already a pre-built version for download and you just need to put in /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages.

2. Install IPython — Obviously, you’ll need to build and install this, luckily it is not hard.

Now if you are like me, you may wonder what just happened, run the following commands to check out the installation:

Finally go test it out and have fun:

For more information view the Official IPython Documentation.

So, since most people simply just want to know where you are without hurting their heads doing a reverse geocode, I have created a greasemonkey user script to help them out.

It takes a twitterrific created location that says “iPhone: 40.733956,-73.992789″ and turns it into “New York, New York, US”

If you have greasemonkey installed, all you need to do is download and install this user script and you will be set. If you don’t have greasemonkey, then you will need to obviously install it first and revisit this page to download the user script.

Hopefully one day the twitterrific iphone app will do this automatically so this script is not needed, but until then, I hope this helps some people out.

2 talks stick out in my mind.

First the “Decorators Are Fun” discussion by Matthew Wilson was easily the most enjoyable discussion for me. Obviously, he demonstrated python decorators, which allow you to dynamically modify functions without actually changing the function. Decorators are not totally unlike AOP or java annotations and it was interesting to see python examples. If there was a downside, it was that his presentation was a little too fast, when you start nesting functions and talking about functions that modify other functions, it gets a little hairy especially if you are new to the concept. But it also makes a ton of sense once you get the hang of it.

The second talk I really enjoyed was Gary Bernhardt’s Talking to the Web with Python. During the talk Gary demonstrated 2 python modules, Beautiful Soup and Universal Feed Parser, for parsing html & xml. I enjoyed this because he provided some very practical examples (eg: parse a webpage for links) of things you may want to do with parsing web pages or syndication feeds. He even showed a simple web crawler in about 8 lines of code, using these modules. Plus Gary had the first talk of the day, which is tough, but he brought a lot of energy to the discussion and kept me focused on his talk, which was good since I was up until 4:30 the night before and the red bull hadn’t kicked in yet.

All in all it was a good day and I am glad I went, I don’t know that I have ever been so excited to learn a new programming language, there is something about python that just clicks in my head, it makes a ton of sense to me. Back in college the president of ACM tried to get me to learn it, but I didn’t listen, not sure why it has taken me 7 years to dig in.

I live about an hour from the nearest apple store, and HATE standing in lines. So on Monday, I started to wonder what is the best way to predict iPhone 3G shipments without stalking the store, and could I perhaps predict accurately enough so that I could get one without standing in line.

Using Apples retail availability page, which is only available after 9pm, was out of the question. But I was curious how they were getting data to that page, and was there a way I could get the data, collect it and analyze it.

And it turns out there was.

Apple is using a json data feed to populate their own availability page. And the json data feed is updating live 24 hours a day. So Monday afternoon I started collecting it about every hour and on Tuesday I started some basic visualizations.

My first cut can be seen at http://andrew.io/3g-retail-stock.

I don’t have a iPhone 3G yet, but I plan to continue collecting the data, and adding visualizations to see if any detectable patterns emerge over time. But at a minimum this can be viewed as an hourly availability tracker with some history of availability.

I hope people like it.

But if you use it, I would recommend you go ahead and call the store before you show up, cause if they don’t have them I take no responsibility.

Move your “My Documents” directory.

Windows likes using “My Documents” as the default location to store everything. And this is typically located at C:\Documents and Settings\__username__\My Documents. And in cygwin your home directory will be something like C:\cygwin\home\__username__. Personally that is one too many places for me to remember, so, I consolidated them into a location located at C:\dev for 2 reasons:

1. cygwin doesn’t like spaces in its path, so this path will not have any
2. If i choose to remove C:\cygwin, I can without blowing away my important documents

This is pretty simple to do, just use windows explorer and browse to your C:\ drive, then create a new folder named “dev”. Then, if you want, copy all your C:\Documents and Settings\__username__\My Documents files into C:\dev. If you don’t, none of your existing documents will be in the “My Documents” location.

Next using windows explorer browse to your old “My Documents” folder and right click on the folder, select properties. This will open a window with 4 tabs, select the Target tab and change the Target folder to C:\dev and hit the ‘OK’ button to close the window.

We’ll fix the cygwin home directory problem later, so go ahead and install cygwin.

Install cygwin

There are million places on the internet that document how to install and configure cygwin, so I am not going to do that here. But I am assuming you use the default cygwin install location of C:\cygwin and you install X Server and X11 Libraries. If you don’t know where to start, visit http://www.cygwin.com, click the Install or Update now icon and follow the installation instructions.

Mount the C:\ drive
After installation there will be a file named Cygwin.bat located at c:\cygwin\Cygwin.bat, double click the file to start a cygwin terminal.

You can access the C:\ drive in cygwin by going to /cygwin/c, but that is too many characters for me to type and would rather I just type ‘cd /c’ and get there. So you can mount the C:\ drive at /c.

Configuring your cygwin user
Once you have your c drive mounted you can set up your user account properly. To do this you will need to edit the /etc/passwd file and create a link to the /c/dev (C:\dev) directory you created earlier.

If your home directory already exists make a back up of it.

Finally, create a softlink from /home/__username__ to /c/dev

And I like having quick access to my desktop, so, while you are here create a softlink to your desktop, so that you can there with ‘cd ~/desktop’.

Configuring X11 and Xterms
Cygwin uses command windows for terminals and I much prefer using xterm and furthermore I want to double click an icon in my taskbar or on my desktop to start the xterm. Luckily if you installed the X11 libraries, cygwin provides a script that does most of that for us. It is located at /usr/X11R6/bin/startxwin.bat.

The only problem is that we need to have the X server running before starting an xterm. So lets create a script that does that. I put mine in /c/dev/bin/mystartx.sh:

Next we need to execute this script, and to do that we can simply call it from the startxwin.bat script mentioned earlier.

Then comment out the line that says:

And add the call the mystartx.sh right below it:

Next we can add the C:\dev\bin\startxwin.bat to our task bar and add a fancy icon like the X11 one for %SystemDrive%\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\XWin.exe. Now if everything worked you should be able to click the new icon and start X server if needed and an xterm each time.

To recap, we now have:

1. the main home directory for both windows and cygwin in the same place
2. the C:\ drive available at /c
3. An icon that will start a xterm, and x server if needed

Now I only need ssh and apache, but that’s a topic for another post.

He appeared to be in excellent physical condition and threw the ball with ease, even throwing it 50 yards “on a rope” with high school receivers. He has been throwing and running with the team for more than a month.

I’m sure this happens a lot more than it is reported, but how would you like to be in high school and working out with a 38 year old Brett Favre. That would be amazing!