Wednesday, September 25, 2002

I admit to a habit of watching crappy TV while doing some late night programming... Just watched a new episode of Frasier. It was amusing to note that Ross now has a Dalmatian as a pet. So -- the show now has a very well behaved/trained/smart Jack Russell Terrier and a Dalmatian as the two dogs. Amusing to note that of all breeds, those are two of the more challenging breeds to integrate into a family. The Jack Russell is an extremely strong willed and very intelligent breed that will cause absolute havoc unless properly trained/worked (very much like a Border Collie). The Dalmatian tends to be a very energetic dog that has little understanding of social limits/boundaries -- i.e. they are not the most gentle of breeds and can't really be trusted with small children. Not that either breed is somehow broken -- both are wonderful in their own right. It is just that neither breed really makes a good family dog yet both breeds are effectively being marketed as such. Do you have any idea how many dalmatian puppies were sold as a result of the Disney flicks (not that I blame Disney-- I don't) and later abandoned, "returned", or destroyed when it turned out that that lovable Dalmatian puppy didn't behave like the ones on the Big Screen? 11:22:19 PM  pontificate

Painless Python on OS X I was extremely happy to see that Python was shipped with OS X 10.2. And it is a recent version, at that. Nice! Unfortunately, Apple could not ship the readline module with Python because that particular module is based on GPL'd code. Of course, code under the GPL isn't actually free and, as such, the entire core operating system cannot contain any non-free or non-Apple owned code. The dev tools-- an add on module on top OS X-- can and does include lots of binaries compiled from GPL'd code. Conveniently, it also includes the readline library. So, one short setup.py later, I now have readline support for OS X. You can to. Just download this little tarball (5.5k). Once uncompressed, go into the resulting folder in Terminal and sudo /usr/bin/python setup.py install. You'll now have readline support when using the python interpreter at the command line! Requires the OS X 10.2 and the July developer tools. Update: Requires the August developer tools patch (as that includes the Readline headers and a new build of the framework). 6:11:24 PM  pontificate