Adam's Awesome Anecdotes

The following are some funny links a co-worker told me about the other day.  Even though it’s been a year and a day since I’ve posted anything to tumblr, despite a plethora of list and bookmarking services, I’m not entirely sure where else to put a small grouping of links where I might actually find them again.  So, hello once again, tumblr!

Oh, also, be sure to check out the customer pictures on some of these!

http://amzn.to/fRKYXD - Denon Audio Cable
http://amzn.to/gRPfNX - Three Wolf Shirt
http://amzn.to/g8aLuJ - Steering Wheel Laptop Holder 

Well, it’s been a year and a day since I’ve even logged into tumblr, let alone posted anything, but I had a great experience with a mechanic today (yes, those are actually possible!) and I just thought I’d give a shout out to Tires Plus (in Athens, GA by Home Depot off Epps Bridge Road).  

For the past day or two the A/C in my car hasn’t been working correctly.  I figured the 100 degree weather had gotten the best of it and perhaps I just needed a charge until today when the check engine light came on.  A minute later I noticed the temperature gauge was scarily close to maxed out.  Luckily I was about a block away from Tires Plus so I gingerly drove the car into their parking lot.  I arrived about 6:20pm and it turns out they don’t close until 7.  I explained what was going on and they said they would squeeze me in (although normally the car should have time to cool off) and run a diagnostic for $20.  About 20 minutes later they explained a clamp had come off one of the radiator hoses, they had fixed it, topped off the fluid and reset the check engine light.  I left just down $20 and quite happy it wasn’t something much worse.  What impressed me was that a mechanic knowing you just coasted in to his shop right at the end of business could have definitely milked some more bucks out a car illiterate person such as myself, but they didn’t and so Tires Plus now gets the Adam seal of approval.  I’ll certainly be giving them my business in the future and if you need tires, an oil change, or a radiator hose clamp you might want to consider them, too.

Just a few things that I found out today:

In order to transfer large files (say, a hefty iPhoto library) between two macs that support firewire, plug in the cable and reboot the old mac (the one with the files to be moved) while holding the ‘T’ key.  Eventually, you’ll see a firewire symbol dancing around the screen.  On the new mac (the target computer) you should see the source machine in the finder now with a pretty gold firewire icon.  For what it’s worth the source machine was running “regular Leopard”, while the target machine was running Snow Leopard.  Obviously, this is MUCH faster that a wired network connection.  

Also, check out Glims for some awesome (and in my opinion much needed) enhancements for Safari — particularly with tab control & search!

This document explains how to get the pyodbc module in python (version 2.6) on Mac OS X Snow Leopard to connect to a SQL Server 2000 instance using FreeTDS and unixODBC.  Although much of the info is contained in the sources at the bottom of this article (and I highly recommend reading through them), I found I had to tweak a few of their steps in each tutorial.  I suspect this is mostly due to version differences since they posted their solution, but much thanks goes to those people for figuring it out and posting their results.  While pyodbc is a very nice module and works great on Windows, this was far more difficult on the Mac that it should have been probably.  I figured just in case the resources I used to figure this out ever vanished, I had better document how I made it work for my setup.  Here are the steps I used.

• Install the Apple Developer Tools / XCode (you need gcc) from either http://developer.apple.com/technologies/xcode.html or from the install DVD
• Download and install MacPorts — http://www.macports.org/
• Download pyodbc (I used version 2.1.7) — http://code.google.com/p/pyodbc/downloads/list

NOTE: all other commands occur in terminal from here on out.

• Install freetds (the sql server driver) — sudo port install freetds +mssql +odbc (note the spaces for the variant names — singletoned’s blog had this as all one word, which threw me a bit due to my unfamiliarity with MacPorts
• Install unixODBC (the odbc / dsn connection setup) — sudo port install unixODBC

• cd into /opt/local/etc/freetds

• Create a Driver Template for unixODBC — sudo touch tds.driver.template  (NOTE: these files didn’t already exist for me, but they may for you.  I suggest you check first)
• Edit the file — sudo vi tds.driver.template

[TDS]

Description     = FreeTDS Driver for Linux & MSSQL on Win32

Driver          = /opt/local/lib/libtdsodbc.so

Setup           = /opt/local/lib/libtdsS.so 

NOTE: The file libtdsS.so doesn’t exist on my system, so I’m not sure if that is actually necessary, but I left it in there anyway

• Create a DSN Template for unixODBC — sudo touch tds.dsn.template
• Edit the file — sudo vi tds.dsn.template

[my_dsn]

Description     = Connection to windows virtual machine

Driver          = TDS

Trace           = No

Database        = my_database_name

Server          = MY-SERVER

Port            = 1433

TDS_Version     = 8.0

• Install the driver file — sudo odbcinst -i -d -f tds.driver.template
• Install the DSN file — sudo odbcinst -i -s -l -f tds.dsn.template

NOTE: singletoned’s blog recommended at this point running easy_install pyodbc.  I ended up having to recompile pyodbc so I don’t recommend following this part (especially since I can’t find a way to uninstall modules yet or what exactly easy_install did).  I just have to research this more.

NOTE: Optionally, if you want to test FreeTDS you can use the following command: tsql -S <server> -U <user> (will prompt for a password.  I believe this will bypass the freetds config file, then again perhaps it uses the file — I don’t really have it clue.  Whatever I did, this seemed to work fine for me.  BTW, the FreeTDS config file can be found at /opt/local/etc/freetds/freetds.config (I never had to edit this file)

• Test your DSN setup — isql -v <my_dsn> <username> <password> (make sure to include your username and password — you won’t be prompted, it will just return error messages about not being able to connect to the datasource

• Unzip pyodbc that you downloaded earlier
• cd into the pyodbc source directory
• Edit setup.py (make a backup first!)
• Find the following two lines

extra_compile_args = None

extra_link_args    = None

• and edit them to look like this (path is different from easysoft instructions):

extra_compile_args = None

extra_link_args    = [‘-L/opt/local/lib’]

• Find this line:

extra_compile_args = [‘-Wno-write-strings’]

• and edit it to look like this (again, path is different from easysoft instructions):

extra_compile_args = [‘-Wno-write-strings’, ‘-I/opt/local/include’]

• Also, the setup.py attempted to accommodate OS X now (not documented in the EasySoft instructions).  So find the section that looks like this:

    elif sys.platform == ‘darwin’:

        # OS/X now ships with iODBC.

        libraries.append(‘iodbc’)

• and make it look like this (just comment it out — perhaps it would be better to use iODBC than unixODBC, but the docs I found were pushing the latter, so I went with it and then was committed by this point!):

    #elif sys.platform == ‘darwin’:

        # OS/X now ships with iODBC.

    #    libraries.append(‘iodbc’)

• Now build pyodbc with: sudo python setup.py build (you may want to rm -rf the build directory in the python source folder to ensure a clean build.  I get a ton of warnings / error here, but apparently they’re OK — they even mention them in the setup.py comments.

• Now install pyodbc with: sudo python setup.py install

• Test it out!  Fire up the python interpreter:

$ python

»>import pyodbc (I get an error message here about pyodbc already being in the classpath — I think it’s from prior attempts.  I’ll figure it out another day.)

»>conn = pyodbc.connect(“DSN=MyDSN;UID=user;PWD=pwd”)

»>cursor = conn.cursor()

»>data = cursor.execute(“select count(*) from …”).fetchone()

»>print data

Hopefully it works at this point!  Good luck!

None of this would have been possible without the helpful advice from the following people:

http://blog.singletoned.net/2009/07/connecting-to-ms-sql-server-from-python-on-mac-os-x-leopard/

http://www.easysoft.com/developer/languages/python/pyodbc.html (for info on recompiling pyodbc with unixODBC support)

http://kipb7.wordpress.com/2008/06/12/pyodbc-unixodbc-freetds-config/

I was just going through photos from my camping trip this weekend, and noticed in many of the pics it appears I had something on the lens, which I didn’t realize until I saw the results on my monitor.  I tried out the Spot Removal tool that a friend had told me about using my Lightroom 3 Beta.  Impressive is not the correct word.  It made what could have been quite tedious or possibly even not worth the effort for some of the photos, a snap.  I fixed them all in literally seconds!  

In other related news, I’m really enjoying both the “faces” feature and the facebook integration in the latest version of iPhoto.  I wish it gave you a little more control, such as importing your description of the photo and not the name of the imported photo.  Perhaps there is a way.  I’ll do some research soon.  Ultimately, I think I’m going to sign back up for Flickr and then work on streamlining a one-stop export: a higher-res version to Flickr and then a so-so quality to facebook.  Ideally including tags in both.  If I could somehow script that into one action, I would be one content rookie photographer.  I’m willing to bet there’s a way or at least something cool out there to play with already.

I also picked up a Magic Mouse for the Mac today.  Pricey?  Yes.  Awesome?  Hell yes! Oh, how I missed you scrolling!   I wonder if this sucker could work with Windows at all.  I’m liking it better than my MS mouse, too!

I just finished up the first episode of the new history channel mini-series, “America: The Story of Us” (http://www.history.com/shows/america-the-story-of-us).  It moves a little slowly and the special effects are both good and at the same time a bit corny, but overall it’s really a well-told, nice concise history.  Plus it’s full of all kinds of random stats and facts.  Some I remember from school while others are completely new to me.  Also, they have some interesting commentators / guests.  Even if you already know all of this stuff, it’s still probably worth checking out if nothing else for the excellent dramatic flair they give the story.  I hope the other episodes are just as good!