Shared State

Tips

• Copying time machine backups to a new disk

  Copying a Time Machine backup from one disk to another is difficult. The official instructions say to copy using Finder. While this may work for a small time machine backup, it does not work well if you have been using time machine for several computers for several years. In particular …

• Connecting to PostgreSQL in Python with PyOdbc in Mac OS X Yosemite

  I spent an embarassing amount of time on this, so I thought I would document it.

  brew install postgresql unixodbc psqlodbc
  

  Start up postgres:

  postgres -D /usr/local/var/postgres
  

  Check that you can connect to the database:

  psql
  

  Inside postgres, create a user with a password. You probably need …

• Marking a Vertica Node as Ephemeral

  First you will need to know the name of the node:

  select * from nodes;
  

  Then mark it as ephemeral:

  alter node v_demo_node0001 is ephemeral;
  

• Using a Vim Clutch

  I've wanted to try a Vim Clutch for a few years now, but once I got it set up, it turned out to be disapointing.

  A Vim Clutch is a foot pedal that toggles between insert mode and normal mode. I set my clutch up a bit differently than the …

• Problems with prefetch in python requests

  Requests is a great library for making HTTP requests. We're using it quite a bit in Infolab to talk to Twitter. Right before they released version 1.0, Requests made a slight change to its streaming API, so the old code results in this error message:

  Traceback (most recent call …

• IPython with PyLab Breaks Built-ins like any() and all()

  Ipython's PyLab breaks some uses of any(), all(), and possibly other built-in functions. Here's a normal IPython shell:

  >ipython
  In [1]: all([x for x in [0,1,2]])
  Out[1]: False
  
  In [2]: all(x for x in [0,1,2])
  Out[2]: False
  
  In [3]: all
  Out[3 …

• Running Screen in a Sudo Session

  If you use sudo su to become a different user, and then try to create a screen session for the new user, it gives this error message:

  Cannot open your terminal '/dev/pts/1' - please check.
  

  The problem is that your original user still owns the pseudo terminal. The best …

• Create a Python Breakpoint in Vim

  Pdb is Python's built-in debugger. To make it easier to start pdb, I added this line to my .vimrc:

  noremap <D-d> Oimport pdb; pdb.set_trace()<Esc>:w<Return>
  

  When I type Command-d in normal mode, vim will insert the line import pdb; pdb.set_trace() and save the current file …