Excel PivotTables are really useful for analyzing data. Excel allows me to use any database via ODBC to get data.

Unfortunately Excel also stores the username, password and query in the spreadsheet which is bad, since I want to share the data, but not the database credentials.

$ xxd example.xls | less

The password and query can be removed from an external data set. Right click, choose External Data Properties.

The password can be removed from a pivot table. Right click, choose Pivot Table Options.

I’m currently trying to glue Crowd authentication into phpBB3 by writing an authentication plugin that uses this Crowd PHP library.

Unfortunately Leopard’s version of PHP is missing the SOAP libraries.

Eelco Wiersma over at Pagebakers has excellent instructions for building and installing the SOAP extension without having to rebuild the whole PHP installation.

It’s nice to see that PostgreSQL has a Mac installer now.

PostgreSQL adjusts the shared memory settings before the install. Fortunately they tell you what changed. I’m not sure what the side effects of increasing shared memory from default 4MB to 32MB is. Probably nothing. I renamed /etc/sysctl.conf to sysctl.conf.postgres and rebooted to undo these changes anyway.

I opted to adjust the postgres configuration instead.
(/Library/PostgreSQL/8.3/data/postgres.conf)

Changing max_connections from 100 to 5 and shared_buffers from 24MB to 128kB allows the database to start. This seems to work fine for my development database.

PostgreSQL needed to be added to the system path.

# ~/.bash_profile
PATH=$PATH:/Library/PostgreSQL/8.3/bin
export PATH


I installed PostgreSQL on a fresh install of Leopard. It turns out that you need the apple development tools installed before installing PostgreSQL or the command line tools don’t work.

dyld: Library not loaded: /Users/buildfarm/pginstaller/server/staging/osx/lib/libpq.5.dylib

This error can be fixed installing the development tools first and then reinstalling PostgreSQL. It looks like the installer uses otool to rewrite the path to the library.

The installer sets PostgreSQL to start automatically when the system boots. This is really annoying especially since I don’t know how to stop it. I can disable the startup item.

$ cd /Library/StartupItems/postgresql-8.3/
$ sudo touch .disabled

But this isn’t a good solution since the Start Server and Stop Server “applications” don’t work when the service is disabled. Grrrr. I’m guessing they’re using something like “sudo SystemStarter start postgresql-8.3″. Is there some way to set a StartupItem to manual?

I read about Balsamiq Mockups today over at the Atlassian Developer Blog. Balsamiq Mockups looks like a nice tool especially since it integrates into Confluence. It looks like JIRA support is coming too. Maybe I’ll get a chance to look into this more later.

For today, I opted to use OmniGraffle. Fortunately I found the Yahoo Design Stencil Kit which made the job even easier. They have stencil kits for Visio and Illustrator too.

WordPress released an iPhone app. Cool.

Jython Console is a Jython Interactive Interpreter that adds Code Completion.

This release fixes bugs that were causing problems with Windows in 0.0.5.

I also added an example of how to embed Jython Console in Java

See the project page for more info.

Jython Console is a Jython Interactive Interpreter that adds Code Completion.

See the project page for more info.

Check out the Emerging Technologies Conference on March 26 and 27th in Philadelphia. There are some interesting presentations and great speakers.

It was kind of a pain to get Rails installed on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). Ruby is in the main repositories, but rdoc and ri are in the universe repository. Universe also has a ruby-full package with dependencies to most of the ruby packages, which is nice.

Enable universe by editing /etc/apt/sources.list

It’s even easier to enable universe through synaptic.

$ sudo synaptec


Settings -> Repositories
Check Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)
Save, Close, Close

Update apt-get and install the ruby-full meta package

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install ruby-full


Install curl

sudo apt-get install curl

Download rubygems-1.0.1 since the one from apt-get is old

$ curl -OL http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/29548/rubygems-1.0.1.tgz
$ tar xzf rubygems-1.0.1.tgz
$ cd rubygems-1.0.1
$ sudo ruby setup.rb

Gem gets installed as gem1.8 which is annoying. (Probably because ruby is a symlinked to ruby1.8). Another symlink fixes this.

$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem


Something in build-essential is required to build mongrel_cluster

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential
$ sudo gem install mongrel_cluser


I use MySQL

$ sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev
$ sudo gem install mysql


Install more gems

$ sudo gem install capistrano
$ sudo gem install soap4r
$ sudo gem install radiant
$ sudo gem install your-favorite-gem
...