Chris Scott

The inaugural meetup of the Orlando Python Users Group was held Wednesday at Stardust. By all accounts (well, mine and Josh’s so far), it was a success. Since our experienced Pythonistas weren’t able to make it, it was a bit of a noob night and discussions turned to Django and also what the heck to do for future meetups. Josh had some good thoughts and put them on the mailing list.

I’m just getting started with Python due to Django so I’m in learning mode but I also want to use the meetups to force me to get my shit together and learn more so I can share w/the group. If you’re interested in OPUG, here’s the relevant links:

• Home Page (which also links to the following)
• Mailing List
• Twitter

Last night, I decided to reload OS X on my MacBook. Contrary to most expert opinions, I upgraded to Leopard instead of doing a clean install. Since my performance has seemingly gotten progressively worse over the past six months, I figured a clean install was the way to go. Here’s what I did:

1. Did a full backup to an external USB drive using SuperDuper.
2. Did the above again to another drive just in case…
3. Left the USB drive attached and rebooted my MacBook while holding down the Option key to get the boot menu and chose to boot from the USB drive just to make sure everything was backed up.
4. Did the above again with the other drive just in case…
5. Disconnected the USB drive, inserted the Leopard DVD and rebooted while holding down the Option key again and chose to boot from the DVD.
6. Did the installation and customized the options to remove print drivers and language translations I don’t use.
7. Created the primary account on the new install the same as my current account.
8. Ran Software Update and rebooted until all updates were installed.
9. Enabled the root user.
10. Logged in as the root user and ran the Migration Utility.
11. Plugged the USB drive in and chose the option to migrate my data from a mountable volume and chose the USB drive and my user account. Chose the option to overwrite the current account.
12. Read a few chapters of a book while this copied.
13. Unmounted the USB drive and rebooted.
14. Logged in as my normal user account and verified everything still worked. It did.

You could probably skip having to enable the root user by creating a temporary user account during the installation and then telling the Migration Utility to just copy your account over since that wouldn’t require replacing the current account which requires you to be logged in as root.

I’m very impressed with how easy this was and that everything “just works” after the restore. If you’ve done this before and have any feedback, let me know in the comments.

Yes, that’s the best title I could come up with for my latest project Followinger. The idea is simple: follow the followinger user and then you can d followinger with a Twitter username and you’ll receive a d back with all kinds of fun stats:

• when their account was created
• how many people they are following
• how many people are following them (friends)
• the ratio of following to friends

The idea is that when you want to make a follow decision these stats are good to know. If you see that the account was just created or they follow way more people than follow them, you may want to think twice about following them back. This tool gives you a way to get this info in a Twitter reply.

Feedback welcome.

We just finished moving a few apps from .Net Framework 1.1 to 3.5. One of the problems we ran into was this exception when using some symmetric encryption code. When we decrypted the value from the DB, this was being thrown.

From what I can tell, it looks like in 1.1 passing null data to the decryption worked (or at least silently failed) and likely returned null back (well, a blank string in our case due to type conversion). However, in 3.5 this exception gets thrown.

An easy fix but one of those little things that took a while to track down so hope this helps someone.

So why are you reading this? Go register!