Alex Stanhope

I've got a few external disks and in travelling from machine to machine over the years, their windows (NTFS) permissions can get pretty screwy:

cmd (run as administrator)
cd
icacls * /T /Q /C /RESET

I'm thinking about the URL structure for a new site. I'm trying to balance two forces:

1. a proper nested hierarchy of URL elements, organised by a single relationship type, for example

http://example.com/contains/section1/section1p1/section1p1p1

2. a single page javascript app that navigates them, individually or in groups, for example

http://example.com/contains/#section1/section1p1/section1p1p1

I think the solution is a moveable hash and a JS redirect.

I'm experimenting with Python and Django at the moment. In trying to connect that pair to MongoDB I stumbled across a couple of alternatives:

• Option 1: MongoDB-Engine
• Option 2: mongoengine and PyMongo

It's frustrating to be trying new things and they don't work, but there is nothing so irratating as something failing that you thought worked and consequently rely upon. These last few weeks I've been struggling with a file sharing bug in Trend Micro's anti-virus program, though as with all these antivirus software originated problems, they don't tell you that. Here's the bug report I was writing up while investigating and crucially the simple solution.

I'm trying to copy a virtual machine (VM) instance from one machine to another over a 1GB LAN.

I use a virtual machine to run Windows-only software on my Mac. The standard UK/US keyboard mappings didn't correspond to the keyboard on my MBP, so I googled for an accurate custom mapping. I actually found this in a Virtualbox bug report but I successfully tested on VMware Fusion 4. Here's the English UK keyword installer to run in the Windows VM.

Again VMware have released a paid update to their Mac OS X "VMware Fusion' product (v5), but it's full of minor revisions that should have gone into their previous version (4). Support for Retina display, Ivy Bridge processors and Windows 8 are features that should be built into the current release (that I bought 2 weeks ago).

What bothers me particularly is that their upgrade policy is a joke. VMware Fusion new costs E43, but if you bought the previous version, it's still E43.

With so much (healthy) competition, it’s important for startups to be innovating at the sharp end. We’ve got to focus on the tiny bit of technology that’s unique to our product and innovate around that. With such a small team (there’s 2 of us), any time we spend doing stuff that’s been done before effectively lessens our chances of differentiating our idea from the thousands of others being developed at the same time. I agree with you Alex on the two-tier system. Even those who have CS degrees need the basic stuff to get easier so we can concentrate on the hard bit of our app.

Defaults are insidious things. Windows 7 has a file sharing protocol default that isn't set out-of-the-box. It meant that my XP machine could connect to one another, but not my new Win7 box. It's a simple fix, then again aren't they always:

Browse through to "Local Policies" then "Security Options", then "Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level"
Select "Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated" from the dropdown.

After getting errors like this:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5030362/how-to-use-opencv-in-python

I discovered that OpenCV works best (most easily) under Windows as 32-bit
http://luugiathuy.com/2011/02/setup-opencv-for-python/

The alternative is to compile OpenCV for 64-bit
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3919681/compiling-opencv-on-windows-7-64bit

I discovered that my Windows install of Python (2.7.3) was conflicting with my (implicit) Cygwin install

(2.6.5), so I removed the Python language package from Cygwin.

I recently managed to install scrapy on a Window 7 64-bit dev machine. It wasn't straight forward so I've

documented the process. Here are the binary install files you need for the install:

python-2.7.3.amd64.msi
lxml-2.3.4-py2.7-win-amd64.egg
pyOpenSSL-0.11.winxp32-py2.7.msi