insomnihack

When sleep eludes, the keyboard beckons

Virtualenv useful on Mac, not so much on PC

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Well, after wrestling with virtualenv on both the PC and Mac, I think I’m going to stick with it for my Mac but bail on it for PC python work.

Mac vs PC on Virtualenv

I really like it on the Mac because now that I’ve moved on to Snow Leopard and Python 2.6, I’m not using a nice isolated environment like the one EPD provided me with. Even though I’m using MacPorts Python 2.6.x, packages get installed into the same location as Snow Leopard’s Python 2.6.1. Since python packages don’t come with an uninstall option, and because I haven’t a clue how to restore Snow Leopard’s Python if I end up adding too much 3rd party gorp, virtualenv seems the prudent course for development on OSX. The only 3rd party libraries I have installed in the main python site-packages folder are setuptools, virtualenv, pip, ipython, and yolk. Everything else (so far) is getting put into a virtual environment. Also, now that I’ve figured out how to get virtualenv and ipython to play nice, isolated development is running smooth as silk.

On Windows, I’ve run into issues related to path names with spaces, and other minor problems. Since I control where python gets installed on Windows, and since python is fairly self contained, its easy to just blow out my install and start over if I add so much cruft that python blows up on me. There’s not much incentive at this time to get virtualenv configuration debugged on my PC.

Hello, web!

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There’s nothing like the smell of the first post of a new blog.

Some background. For a long while, I was using RapidWeaver to manage my personal blog. I don’t carry my Mac around as much as I used to, and I’m much more cross-platform than I was when I started dmdavis.net. Because of this, I hadn’t updated the site in almost a year. Plus, it had become a hodge podge of family, gaming, tech, and general interest stuff.

In a word: unfocused.

After setting up WordPress for my wife Shelly to use as a diary about raising our daughter, Sophia, I decided it was high time I got back into it. I figured I should probably separate out the tech stuff from the family stuff on the old site. Thus, I present to you insomnihack, a holding place for my idle musings on programming and technology for when I’m too awake to sleep and too tired to code.

I rather hope we both stick around for a while.