Mike Grouchy

Unblock out of region content with Digital Ocean and sshuttle

2014-06-22T00:00:00-04:00

If you live in Canada(like me) or elsewhere. You are probably interested in paying for services like Hulu and Spotify and are probably wondering how you can get that good US netflix content. You will be happy to know that it is in fact very easy to accomplish this for as little as 5$/month through Digital Ocean and still have a server that you can do other things with in the meantime.

Before I go through the setup here, I know there are alternatives which are similarily priced. Unblock.us, and mediahint to just name a couple.The big advantage here is that you can setup/teardown your Digital Ocean droplets at your convenience which is nice if you are really pinching pennies, because these are charged hourly.

The other big advantage of using something like Digital Ocean is that you can use the droplet for other things besides using it tunnel your internet traffic. Convinced yet? If so, lets move on to the setup.

1. Signup For Digital Ocean/Set up a Droplet

The first step here is just to head over to Digital Ocean (referral) and signup. This can also be accomplished with a VPN you already have, and if that is the route you want to go, just head on down to step 2.

Once you have logged into your Digital Ocean account and have verified your email and billing details you can go ahead and click on the "Create" button in the side bar. This should give you the Droplet creation wizard and you can just follow these steps:

First chose a hostname, this can be whatever you want, like "VPN", etc. Once you have chosen a hostname, go ahead and select the region you want your traffic to be in. If you are Canadian like me who might want your traffic to appear as it is comign from the US then you want to select a US Region. Next you choose your flavor of Linux, in my case I have chosen Ubuntu. Next you want to choose the SSH keys to use, if you have set them up. If you don't have ssh keys set up and you don't want to use them. That is okay, after you create the droplet Digital Ocean will email you a root password to the email you signed up with. It is recommended you change this root password by sshing into your droplet with the current root password and changing it.

2. Install sshuttle

Installing sshuttle is each, just download it to your computer. You also need Python installed on your machine(Mac or Linux) to eventually run sshuttle.

    git clone git://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle

Optionally you can download and extract a zip or a .tar.gz from the sshuttle download page on Github.

3. Start your Tunnel

Okay. We have our droplet setup and we have downloaded sshuttle. Now to start our DNS tunnel.

Navigate to the directory where you downloaded sshuttle locally then:

   ./sshuttle --dns -vvr root@dropletserver 0/0

This will then prompt you for your local root password and the password to your droplet. Note: On OSX this will require a restart after you run this the first time.

You should now be able to navigate to that out of region website you wanted to visit so much and it should just work.

What else is this good for?

It is essentially a poor mans instant VPN, you don't even need to have root access on the machine you are connecting to.
Allows you to surf safely. It protects you from standard attacks like Firesheep on insecure networks.
Anything else you can think of that you would like to use a VPN for.

Any other uses for this or thoughts about this? Leave something in the comments or contact me on twitter.

Pro Tip - Pip Upgrade All Python Packages

2014-06-02T00:00:00-04:00

An open and ongoing feature request for PIP is to add an upgrade-all command to PIP. Due to the lack of this feature a workaround is required. Enter Stackoverflow.

I have been using a variation of this particular command line trick for awhile, but when starting writing this up I googled other solutions and this is one of the nicest and most straightforward I have seen.

    pip freeze --local | grep -v '^\-e' | cut -d = -f 1  | xargs pip install -U

So next time you want to upgrade all the packages in your virtualenv, this is a great place to start. I have this set up as an alias to pipup in my .zshrc for convenience.

Django-Stronghold 0.2.6 released

2014-05-28T00:00:00-04:00

I have just pushed version 0.2.6 of Django-Stronghold to pypi.

The main update in this version is the new configuration option STRONGHOLD_PERMISSIONS_DECORATOR.

The STRONGHOLD_PERMISSIONS_DECORATOR setting allows you to override the default behavior which currently defaults to requiring your views to default to login_required and replace that with any decorator you like that serves your purpose like the staff_member_required decorator or a decorator you have created yourself which supports your specific mix of login requirements.

This version currently supports Django 1.4.x, 1.5.x and 1.6.x, download it and try it out and please report any bugs if you notice anything.

Changes to Python Jobs HQ

2013-03-22T00:00:00-04:00

We are rolling out some changes to Python Jobs HQ today which I think will add some greater value for people who post their jobs on there.

What is Changing?

First thing is that python job postings will be longer in duration. They will now be 45 instead of 30 days and as a consequence of this the price will be changing from 149$ to 199$ per ad.

The second change is that besides having your Job ad tweeted by the Pycoder's Twitter account we will also be adding your Job ad to the Pycoder's Weekly newsletter in a brand new "Python Jobs" section twice in the 45 day duration of your job post.

What about current job posts?

If you already have a job post at this time we will be matching these changes for your current job post at no extra charge. We have increased the length of your posting by 15 days to meet the 45 and we will be looking to meet our 2 issue minimum for your Job posting over the next couple of weeks.

Yes, your code does need comments.

2013-03-05T00:00:00-05:00

I imagine that this post is going to draw the ire of some. It seems like every time I mention this on Twitter or anywhere else there is always some pushback from people who think that putting comments in your code is a waste of time.

I think your code needs comments, but so we have a mutual understanding, lets qualify that.

def somefunction(a, b):
   #add a to b
   c = a + b
   #return the result of a + b
   return c

I understand this is a contrived example but this is the comment trap that new developers get caught in. These types of comments really aren't useful to anyone. Peppering the code that you just wrote with excessive comments, especially when it is abundantly clear what the code is doing, is the least useful type of comment you can write.

"Code is far better describing what code does than English, so just write clear code"

This is usually the blowback you get from comments like the ones above. I don't disagree, programming languages are definitely more precise than English. What I don't agree with is the idea that if the code is clear and understandable that comments are unneeded or don't have a place in modern software development.

So knowing this, what kind of comments am I advocating for? I'm advocating for comments as documentation. Comments that explain what a complex piece of code does, and most importantly what an entire function or Class does and why they exist in the first place.

So what is a good example of the kind of documentation I am talking about? I think Zed Shaw's Lamson is a fantastic example of this. Here is a code excerpt from that:

class Relay(object):
    """
    Used to talk to your "relay server" or smart host, this is probably the most
    important class in the handlers next to the lamson.routing.Router.
    It supports a few simple operations for sending mail, replying, and can
    log the protocol it uses to stderr if you set debug=1 on __init__.
    """
    def __init__(self, host='127.0.0.1', port=25, username=None, password=None,
                 ssl=False, starttls=False, debug=0):
        """
        The hostname and port we're connecting to, and the debug level (default to 0).
        Optional username and password for smtp authentication.
        If ssl is True smtplib.SMTP_SSL will be used.
        If starttls is True (and ssl False), smtp connection will be put in TLS mode.
        It does the hard work of delivering messages to the relay host.
        """
        self.hostname = host
        self.port = port
        self.debug = debug
        self.username = username
        self.password = password
        self.ssl = ssl
        self.starttls = starttls

   ...

This code snippet is from https://github.com/zedshaw/lamson/blob/master/lamson/server.py. You can poke around the lamson code and see some good looking Python code but also some usefully documented code.

So hold on. Why are we writing comments?

Why are we writing comments, if you write clean, understandable code? Why do we need to explain what classes and functions do if the code is "clear" and easy to understand.

In my opinion, we write comments to capture intent. Comments are the only way to capture the intent of the code at the time of writing.

Looking at a block of code only allows you to understand the intent of that particular code at that moment in time which may be very different then the intent of the code at time of its original writing.

Writing comments captures intent.

Writing comments captures the original meaning of the code. Python has docstrings for this, other languages have comparable options. What is so good about docstring type comments? In conjunction with unambiguous class and function names they can easily describe the original intent of your code.

Why is capturing the original intent of your code important?

It allows a developer, at a glance, to look at a piece of code and know why it exists.
It reduces situations where a piece of codes original intent isn't clear then gets modified and leads to unintended regressions.
It reduces the amount of context a developer must hold his/her mind to solve any particular problem that may be contained in a piece of code.

Writing comments to capture intent is like writing tests to prove that your software does what is expected.

Where do we go from here?

The first step is to realize that the documentation/comments accompanying a piece of code can be just important as the code itself and need to be maintained as such. Just like code can become stale if you don't keep it updated so do comments. If you update some code you must update the accompanying comments/documentation or they become useless and can lead to more developer error then not having comments at all. So we have to treat comments and documentation as first class citizens.

Next we have to agree on what is important to comment on in your code, and how to structure your code to make your use of comments most effective. Most of this relies on your own judgement but we can cover most issues with some steadfast rules.

Never name your classes and functions ambiguously.
Always use inline comments on code blocks that are complicated or may appear unclear.
Always use descriptive variable names.
Always write comments describing the intent or reason why a piece of code exists.
Always keep comments up to date when editing commented code.

As you can see from the points above code as documentation and comments as documentation are not mutually exclusive. Both are necessary to create readable code that is easily maintained by you and future maintainers.

If you are interested in keeping up with the latest Python news, discussions, projects, articles and Jobs you should check out Pycoder's Weekly the Python newsletter that I curate.

Using Johnny Cache with Heroku and Memcachier

2013-02-21T20:25:00-05:00

Johnny Cache is a pretty great caching framework for Django. For most apps you can drop Johnny-cache in and depending on your Django project get a good result right out of the box. If this sounds appealing check out the docs for more details.

A recent issue that I have run into is that a deploying a Django App on Heroku with Johnny Cache does not work out of the box with my Memcached service of choice Memcachier.

After some investigation the issue here is that Johnny Cache doesn't support SASL out of the box which is how the authentication for Memcachier works. Memcachier reccomends using django-pylibmc's libmemcached backend to use its app. Of course this isn't compatible with Johnny Cache out of the box either so what do you do?

Create your own SASL compatible backend for Johnny Cache

This is a fairly straightforward problem to solve, we can just inherit from the PyLibMCCache backend from django-pylibmc and override its _get_memcache_timeout method with the one from Johnny Cache.

Then update your django settings file to point at the new backend you have just created.

Make sure in your CACHES settings dict that you make sure you set BINARY to True and you are off to the races.

Any questions? Feel free to ask in the comments or hit me up on Twitter

Announcing Django-Stronghold

2013-02-15T10:00:00-05:00

I spent much of last year trying to turn up my open source contributions so I spent much of my time contributing to other peoples open source projects. Its 2013 and its a new year, so I am making a push to get some open source projects that I have had in the pipe actually out there in the wild.

The first of these is django-stronghold.

If you are a Django developer and you have worked on a Django project of any size, you might have coded something like this already which makes it the perfect target for open source.

Stronghold defaults your Django project to private. This means that via some middleware all your Django views become login_required. Stronghold also provides some mechanisims to make views public via a decorator or whitelisting some of your url patterns. If this sounds useful to you check it out. If you run into any issues please let me know!

Shout out to Richard Blair for help with this.

Introducing Python Jobs HQ

2013-02-14T10:35:00-05:00

As you may know if you have read this blog, I am one of the curators for Pycoder's Weekly. We have been working on a bunch of small projects to try to bring more value from Pycoder's into the Python community. The first thing we have launched this year is Python Jobs HQ.

Python Jobs HQ is a Job site we are running that is focused on putting the best jobs in front of the best people. Jobs posted on the site are posted to the @pycoders fast growing Twitter account and the Job Board is advertised weekly in the newsletter. Already we have had great companies like Newsle, Path Datadoghq and Cyan Inc. and others post with us. If you have a Python Job to post for your company or if you are looking to find a new job as a Python Developer, you should check out Python Jobs HQ.

If you have any questions feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or email our Pycoder's Email.

Force websites to use SSL in Google Chrome

2012-07-23T09:30:00-04:00

I saw this tip in the comments over at Hacker News today and I thought that this is a great alternative to force SSL for sites that don't have it available.

Step 1

Navigate to Chrome's net internals dashboard by typing

chrome://net-internals/ into your browser.

You should see:

Step 2

Navigate to the HSTS(HTTPS Strict Transport Security) Tab and you should see this:

Step 3

From there its pretty easy, just type in the site you want to force to SSL and you are done!

Do you have any other Chrome security tips? Leave them in the comments!

The Setup

2012-07-18T08:35:00-04:00

This post is inspired by Mahdi and The Setup. I had originally written a rather terrible post about my development toolbox so I figured it was time to revisit this and get it right for people who care.

Hardware

Not a lot going on here, nothing fancy. Just macs, running OSX Lion. The hardware is a bit older, but I spend most of my time in a terminal, so I don't really notice so much.

Work:

2008 Aluminum Macbook, 4GB ram
Magic Mouse
Standard Apple wired keyboard (I like having the numberpad and not having to be worried about batteries)
27" Cinema Display

Out of all these things, I would have to say the cinema display is incredible. I don't normally use my laptop screen when it is connected to the cinema display to avoid RSI issues, however, when I do have it open its normally just for the rdio client.

Home:

2010 iMac 21.5", 8GB Ram
Magic Mouse
Apple wireless bluetooth keyboard

I don't use this often, as it is the computer my wife uses primarily. I only tend to use it when I don't feel like slogging around with my laptop at home, or I have left it at the office or something.

I have also taken to writing drafts for my blogposts using Github Gists with my 1st Generation 32GB iPad and the apple bluetooth keyboard. I have found this to be a fantastic way to write a blogpost or a little code while out at a coffee shop or anywhere else when I am on the go.

Software

Like I said earlier, I don't spend too much time outside the console, but when I do these are the things I couldn't live without.

Moom - This is an awesome app, it allows you to tile windows in OSX, attach hotkeys to tiling commands and a bunch of other niceties that don't exist on OSX.
rdio - As I mentioned earlier, I use rdio. I listen to music all the time while coding, or thinking or just about anything, so I have rdio going basically all the time.
Flint - We use campfire for team chat in the office so I use flint for that.
Chrome - The web browser of champions, I pretty much use Chrome exclusively now and normally have way too many tabs open.
Skitch - I use skitch for taking screenshots on OSX it has really great support for simple editing and cropping of your screenshots that I would have a hard time switching to anything else. I dont use their server anymore for storage of my screenshots, I have a proxy set up using heroku to send my screenshots to a Amazon S3 bucket. This is accomplished with s3itch.
Dropbox -Dropbox is fantastic. I store all the git repos I am working on in Github and it has saved my butt a few times now. I can feel safe everything is backed up and even untracked files(in git) are being versioned, just incase I delete a untracked file I end up needing.
Alfred - Alfred is an indispensable quick launcher app in the vein of quicksilver. I spend most of my time with my hands off the mouse so I don't know what I would do without Alfred.
RescueTime - I work pretty hard to try to stay productive and at the very least stay knowledgeable about where my time is going. RescueTime helps with that by tracking what I do on the computer every day.

Command Line Life

The command line is where I spend most of my time, on OSX I don't use the terminal software that comes with OSX, I use iTerm2. In that terminal I use:

Zsh with Oh-my-zsh, because as you know, Zsh is your friend, you can check out my .zshrc in my dotfiles repo.
Vim - The only text editor in my opinion. This is where I spend most of my time check out my vimfiles for setup details.

tmux - Tmux is great. Its a great alternative to gnu screen, highly configurable and looks great.

bpython - bpython is improved interface to the Python interpreter. It supports syntax highlighting, autocomplete and a bunch of other useful features. I usually have bpython open all day every day.

On My desk

Books:

Natural Language Processing With Python - Steven Bird, Ewan Klein and Edward Loper
Javascript - The Definitive Guide - David Flanagan
Expert Python Programming - Tarek Zaide

A bunch of Pycoders stickers

Thats about it. What does your setup look like?

Broken RSS Links Fixed

2012-07-10T09:00:00-04:00

It seems my RSS feed has failed epically and none of the actual links to the blog worked. Not too awesome for you RSS readers out there.

Needless to say, that is fixed now. Thank you to the people who went through the trouble to notify me of my broken RSS. Your help is much appreciated.

Setting up PyPy 1.9 on OSX

2012-07-08T10:00:00-04:00

As I had said before on this blog, I sometimes use it as a way to record things I want to remember. This is one of those times.

I have started a new project that uses PyPy and while there is documentation out there to get started, I find it useful to have it all in the same place and not spread around.

What is PyPy

PyPy is Python interpreter and JIT compiler. The latest PyPy release PyPy 1.9, the one we are installing, is CPython 2.7.2 compatible. PyPy is focused on speed and 100% compatibility with the CPython.

Installing PyPy

There are a couple of options to install PyPy on OSX.

You can install using the binary from the PyPy website.
You can build PyPy from source.
You can install using Homebrew.

I like to manage my packages using Homebrew when thats an option, so I installed using Homebrew. It was very easy to get setup just

    brew install PyPy

Then follow any instructions in your terminal.

You should then see a symlink in your /usr/local/bin directory for PyPy

    ~ >> ls /usr/local/bin | grep pypy
    pypy

And assuming you have homebrew setup correctly you should be able to type "pypy" in your terminal and get an interactive interpreter.

    ~ >> pypy
    Python 2.7.2 (341e1e3821ff, Jun 07 2012, 15:42:54)
    [PyPy 1.9.0 with GCC 4.2.1] on darwin
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    And now for something completely different: ``it's beautiful: very rectangular
    and yellow''
    >>>>

If you have gotten this far you have been successful at installing PyPy!

Now, like any good pycoder, lets move on to getting PyPy setup inside a Virtualenv.

Getting PyPy to work with Virtualenv or Virtualenvwrapper

Luckily getting PyPy set up in a virtualenv is really easy, for virtualenv the command is:

    virtualenv -p /usr/local/bin/pypy environmentname

for Virtualenvwrapper, its basically the same:

    mkvirtualenv -p /usr/local/bin/pypy environmentname

In the output of each of these commands you should see:

    Running virtualenv with interpreter /usr/local/bin/pypy
    New pypy executable in testpypy2/bin/pypy
    Installing setuptools............done.
    Installing pip...............done.

Now you can activate your environment.

In virtualenv:

    source /path/to/your/virtualenv/bin/activate

In virtualenvwrapper:

    workon environmentname

And test your Python version:

    python --version
    Python 2.7.2 (341e1e3821ff, Jun 07 2012, 15:42:54)
    [PyPy 1.9.0 with GCC 4.2.1]

Now you are good to get working on your Python project with PyPy. Happy hacking!

Write Less Code

2012-06-26T09:50:00-04:00

One of the fundamental truths of software development is that you have to write code, but one of the biggest fallacies is the idea that writing code is your job. When I first started out as a software developer, I fell into that trap, writing code is a powerful thing, its empowering, you feel like you are productive and you are accomplishing things. However, what I have learned over the years is the real truth of the matter. The truth that the job of a software developer is to write as little code as possible.

Now, don't get me wrong, we should not be getting ourselves into code golf situations where we are compacting code and saving keystrokes to the point where the code you produce is no longer understandable. When you think about it though the fact that most of your time will be maintaining the terrible code you wrote, writing less code and not creating more work for yourself will start to look like an exceptionally good idea.

Why?

Look around, look at your tools, look at the framework you likely use to produce that thing you work on. Everything you do, all the tools you use, everything is trying make you write less code. Your tools are trying to make you less error prone, and abstracting away the things that will cause you trouble down the road.

So why should you write less code? When I said earlier that your job was to write less code, I was fibbing a little bit. Really your job is to think, your job is to think about the problem at hand, devise an elegant solution and then turn that solution into software. One of the byproducts of creating software is that you have to write code to solve problems.

Code is a by-product

Code isn't that important. We love to convince ourselves that it is because as we actually start executing and turning our solutions into software, it seems like writing code is both a means and an end unto itself. We talk about our editors, we talk about our language of choice and we talk about our environments. I do it, you do it, we all do it. There is no shame in enjoying the craft of the work you do. The trick is to stay focused. Code is awesome, but its also the enemy, it takes time to write, it can be fragile, it can be unclear and not particularly robust.

This is why I stick with the mantra "Write less code". Whenever I feel like something is getting bigger than it should be or more complicated than it should be, I say "Write less code". Whenever I write so much code that it gets hard to keep it in context, I refactor, I clean it up, all the while, thinking about "Write less code".

As much as it pains me to say, sometimes there is no way to get around writing a bunch of code, but if you can't be concise, be clear. Writing less code is writing clean code. Writing less code is also about writing clear code. When you are economical with the code you write the purpose of your code becomes clear.

So, whats the lesson here? Most importantly I think the lesson here is that code is a by-product, its an unavoidable thing that you generate in the process of doing your job. So think more, refactor more, remove some old code and write less new code, do yourself a favor and start this today.

Great Python/Django Testing Talks

2012-06-10T21:05:00-04:00

I have been working on some tests for an upcoming product at SWIX and as any good developer I think its important to make an effort to constantly be learning new things. In this vein I starting digging through the videos for this years Pycon US. Lo and Behold Testing was a popular topic at Pycon so there were lots of talks to watch!

My two favorite talks were Testing and Django by Carl Meyer and Fast Test, Slow Test by the always insightful Gary Bernhardt.

Testing and Django - Carl Meyer

Carl Meyer gives this great deep dive into testing Django projects, there are plenty of gems in here, including some code for a Django Test Runner using Unittest2's test discovery. Carl gives some great tips for writing tests with Django as well as tips for just writing good tests in general.

Fast Test, Slow Test - Gary Bernhardt

This talk is superb. Gary Bernhardt talks about how to write a fast test suite as well as how you should be testing your applications. He points out that the slow test suite problem is usually releated to the problem of test authors writing Unit Tests which are actually System Tests.

Those two testing talks were my favorites, but some other good ones that are worth checking out are:

Certainty in an Uncertain World: Gaining Confidence through Security Testing - Geremy Condra
Fake It Til You Make It: Unit Testing Patterns With Mocks and Fakes - Brian K. Jones
Speedily Practical Large-Scale Tests - Erik Rose
Stop Mocking, Start Testing - Augie Fackler & Nathaniel Manista
pytest - rapid and simple testing with Python - Holger Krekel

Besides these videos another great resource to take your Python testing a bit farther is this book, the Python Testing Cookbook . It has plenty of great strategys that you can use for testing your Python projects.

If you have any other good Django testing tips or Talks leave them in the comments. If you are looking for more Python news, tips and discussion you should check out Pycoders Weekly, a weekly Python newsletter that I curate.

Be Pythonic: init.py

2012-05-16T23:25:00-04:00

This is hopefully the first in a series of posts about writing Pythonic code and explaining some common Python idioms.

So the first thing I am going to address in this series of posts is __init__.py.

What is `init.py` used for?

The primary use of __init__.py is to initialize Python packages. The easiest way to demonstrate this is to take a look at the structure of a standard Python module.

package/
    __init__.py
    file.py
    file2.py
    file3.py
    subpackage/
        __init__.py
        submodule1.py
        submodule2.py

As you can see in the structure above the inclusion of the __init__.py file in a directory indicates to the Python interpreter that the directory should be treated like a Python package

What goes in `init.py`?

__init__.py can be an empty file but it is often used to perform setup needed for the package(import things, load things into path, etc).

One common thing to do in your __init__.py is to import selected Classes, functions, etc into the package level so they can be convieniently imported from the package.

In our example above we can say that file.py has the Class File. So without anything in our __init__.py you would import with this syntax:

from package.file import File

However you can import File into your __init__.py to make it available at the package level:

# in your __init__.py
from file import File

# now import File from package
from package import File

Another thing to do is at the package level make subpackages/modules available with the __all__ variable. When the interpeter sees an __all__ variable defined in an __init__.py it imports the modules listed in the __all__ variable when you do:

from package import *

__all__ is a list containing the names of modules that you want to be imported with import * so looking at our above example again if we wanted to import the submodules in subpackage the __all__ variable in subpackage/__init__.py would be:

__all__ = ['submodule1', 'submodule2']

With the __all__ variable populated like that, when you perform

from subpackage import *

it would import submodule1 and submodule2.

As you can see __init__.py can be very useful besides its primary function of indicating that a directory is a module. If you have any comments or questions, hit up the comments or contact me on twitter.

If you are looking for more Python news, tips and discussion you should check out Pycoder's Weekly a weekly Python newsletter that I curate.

Compile Vim with Python support on OSX with Homebrew

2012-05-09T10:17:00-04:00

Mahdi asked me today how I compiled Vim with +Python on OSX and I couldn't remember the exact commands, so I am writing this blog post so I will remember in the future and because someone else might find this useful.

Compiling Vim with +Python or +Ruby is required if you want to run any plugins that have peices that are written in those languages. The usual way around this on OSX is to just install MacVim and use that. However, if you really want to use terminal Vim, you are out of luck on OSX.

So this is where Homebrew comes in, we can use Homebrew to compile vim from a custom formula. The only requirements to do this are Mercurial and Homebrew.

You can install Mercurial by using either easy_install or pip:

#install mercurial
sudo easy_install mercurial
#or
sudo pip install mercurial

You can follow the directions on the Homebrew Github Wiki to install homebrew.

Now you can Install this Homebrew formula which has been modified slightly to my tastes to install Vim.

To install this formula you can just use this command, or fork the Gist and modify the formula as you see fit(that's what I did) to install your flavor of Vim.

brew install https://raw.github.com/gist/2051422/0cfce544a4ab86318221c4d7213306a7b7ec7b3d/vim.rb

By default the Vim compiled with this script is compiled with +python and +ruby, if you want support for other interpreters you can pass those parameters to the script with:

--enable-interp=NAME,...", "lua, mzscheme, perl, python, python3, tcl and/or ruby"

You can also specify vim be compiled with features(the scripts, default is normal) To see what the features do, you can see this rather ugly table

--with-features=TYPE", "tiny, small, normal, big or huge"

Now that you have vim installed with your interpreters and features compiled, go ahead and check the version:

vim --version

and you should see that it is the updated version.

If you don't see that it is the updated version, it means your /usr/local/bin isn't on your path, or if it is on your path it comes after usr/bin.

So how do you fix this?

Option 1: Update your path:

In your .zshrc (you are using Zsh right?) or .bashrc update your path.

#this
export PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
#to this
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin

Option 2: Move your old Vim and symlink the new one

You can move the Vim that comes with OSX and Symlink the one brew installed

sudo mv /usr/bin/vim /usr/bin/oldvim
ln -s /usr/local/bin/vim /usr/bin/vim

One of those should solve your problem.

Protip:

You may notice that your terminal Vim does not support backspace in Insert mode with the settings I have setup in the brew formula.

If this is something you want, you can stick this line in your .vimrc:

set backspace=indent,eol,start

I think that should be it. If you have any questions leave it in the comments or ask me on twitter.

Edit: Discussion on Hacker News

Introducing Pycoders Weekly

2012-02-06T10:00:00-05:00

The last couple of weeks Mahdi Yusuf and I have been talking about the Python newsletter that we would want to recieve weekly. A curated collection of the best Python news, articles and projects from around the internet delivered to your inbox in a beautiful package weekly.

The result of this talk has been Pycoders Weekly. The first issue is set to drop on Friday, February 17th, we hope you like it.

If you have created some content or run some project that you think should be in Pycoders Weekly contact Mahdi or me and let us know.

Zsh is your friend

2012-01-31T11:14:00-05:00

I don't know if you know this, but ZShell is your friend, you might not know it yet, but its true. I know what you are thinking , "whats wrong with Bash?", nothing, except its not Zsh.

Its not that Bash is a bad guy, I don't want to put him down, but if we were picking teams, Bash would be last picked in gym class.

He isn't very versatile and he doesn't do anything particularily great, all in all he is kind of just a worse Zsh(or Zsh is kind of like a better Bash).

Zsh is easy to get started with because it looks and acts like bash in a lot of ways. So if you are familiar with bash don't worry, you can try zsh out without skipping a beat and you still end up with a better shell.

Why is Zsh better than Bash?

In my mind one of the most important reasons why Zsh is better than bash is autocompletion, and I don't mean that whimpy autocompletion you get by installing bash completion. I mean, this is real deal command completion, besides getting all the completion of common commands on the command line, and being ridiculously fast, the completion also gives you a keyboard navigable completion list.

Okay, I know what you are saying, big deal right? Well how about really great built in autocompletion for common commands. Lets use Kill as an example. You type

    Kill <tab>

in bash, you get what, the list of all files that are in your current working directory. Not very helpful behavior in my opinion. What happens if you type

    kill <tab>

in Zsh? This:

Lists of all your processes with pids? Yes please.

Another thing that make makes Zsh stand out is shared history. If you are anything like me you live in the terminal all day long. There is nothing worse(I'm exaggerating) than opening another terminal in a tab and navigating your history looking for that recent thing you just did in another window and have it not be in your history. In Zsh this isn't an issue.

Time for more awesome

Okay, so we have great, fast autocompletion and shared history. How much more awesome could there be? Lots!

Autocorrect is pretty cool

mikegrouchyv2 ::(master*) » gut status
zsh: correct 'gut' to 'git' [nyae]?y
git status

Hey thats pretty cool, autocorrect for known commands. What would I do without you(besides type the command again)?

Even cooler than autocorrect, for the super nerd(like me) Vi and emacs mode, shit yeah, you can have your favorite editor on your command line. It will support common movement commands and editing modes, like command and insert mode for Vi.

Last but certianly not least, Zsh has oh-my-zsh from the website:

A community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration. Includes 40+ optional plugins (rails, git, OSX, hub, capistrano, brew, ant, macports, etc), over 80 terminal themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool so that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community.

I know one exists for bash, but I find oh-my-zsh to be excellent, it autoupdates, has great plugins and a very active community behind it.

All in all, Zsh is pretty great, so if you haven't tried Zsh, maybe its time you try it out. If so oh-my-zsh is a pretty great place to start.

Also releated reading, a book that was reccomended to me with a lot of great Zsh tips as well as Bash tips for those who I haven't convinced yet is Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the Command Line.

If you are already drinking the Kool-aid and have some Zsh tips to share, either leave a comment or hit me up on twitter.

EDIT: If you are interested in learning more about Zsh, check out the Zsh FAQ. Its pretty complete and much better than I could do in a very basic blog post.

Also, More discussion on Hacker News

Setting up SSL with Nginx and Godaddy

2010-12-14T18:07:00-05:00

I was at a local coffee company the other day and Josh and I were talking about some annoyances when dealing with godaddys SSL certificates. Talking to him about this reminded me that I had this post in the pipe for a long time and gave me the motivation to finish this.

On Many browsers, if you set up a standard Godaddy SSL Certificate out of the box, you will get ssl errors in many browsers saying that they can't recognize your certificate authority, this is generally not a good thing the whole point of installing SSL is for security and establishing trust iwith your customers, clients and website visitors.

To start the process of getting set up with an SSL certificate from godaddy just go and purchase one. You can pick anyone you like, but in general for most things you can get away with just purchasing the cheapest one, I think its around 21$/yr.

After you purchase your certificate, open up a terminal and log onto your server. You first need to create a key and certificate request for your domain.

Just fill out the requested information and you should be good to go. You then log into your godaddy account and provide godaddy with the certificate request and they will generate the certificate for you. With the cheaper certificate this process usually takes minutes. For the more expensive certificte the process takes considerably longer.

After you recieve your certificates from godaddy, you need to put your certificates on your server and then you just add these lines to the approprate section of your configs depending on your webserver.

For nginx:

For apache:

If you have any questions, either leave something in the comments, or you can catch me here on twitter.

SICP in Epub Format

2010-07-05T20:14:00-04:00

Awhile ago, I ran across a list of programming/algorithm/computer science book reccomendations and on that list was Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs(SICP). Ever since then it and a few other books have been on the top of my must read list.

I have been interested in learning lisp for quite awhile, I think its probably the Hacker News influence, lisp is often talked about there as Hacker News is written in a dialect of lisp authored by Paul Graham and Robert Morris called Arc. So while in SICP the dialect of lisp is not Arc but Scheme, from its description and reviews I have read, SICP seems like it would be a great way to get started programming in lisp.

Why learn lisp you say? Certianly not to actually program in it professionally, I actually don't know anyone who programs in lisp for their job(Thats not to say there aren't lisp jobs out there). The reason to learn lisp is that by all accounts learning lisp is a transformative experience. I have consistently read and have had one of my very good friends tell me that learning to write lisp changes the way you think about programming and writing software. If nothing else that should make it worth the time and effort to learn.

So back to SICP. I have been meaning to pick up a copy and start reading it for awhile but I had never got around to it. There is a web version but like a lot of people, I have a hard time reading from my computer screen, not because it hurts my eyes or anything like that, I think its just a matter of focus. There are so many things external to the book when you are reading it while sitting at your computer that it becomes tempting to multitask while reading. So today I was very excited to learn that Ian Eure created an epub copy of the book and its available on github.

This is a perfect format for me, I can now load it onto my iphone(on stanza or ibooks) and read away while I spend my ~1.5 hours/day commuting on the bus back and forth to work. I usually try to get books in PDF form and just read them out of dropbox, which is a good experience, but I would definately prefer epub as its easier to read. All in all this is a pretty big win for me and its certianly a great motivator to get me started reading SICP and learning Scheme.

Are there any books like SICP that you would reccomend? I'd love to get some suggestions, just leave a note in the comments!

My Development Toolbox: An Introduction

2010-07-04T18:14:00-04:00

Lately I have seen a bunch of posts where bloggers, developers, etc. talk about their current development environments and hardware. I really enjoy these posts because its always nice to see what tools other developers are using, so I thought I would chip in with a few blog posts of my own. In a couple of "My Toolbox" posts, I will talk about the hardware and software I use to do my work as Software Developer(currently doing mostly Python/Django work at SWIX.

All in all the hardware I use in the office is pretty basic. I currently use a 13.3-Inch MacBook Pro, a pretty standard Dell 22-inch monitor, standard Apple keyboard and the amazing Apple Magic Mouse.

Nothing fancy going on there, pretty standard hardware configuration and generally what everyone in the office currently uses as we all tend to work both in the office and from home from time to time. This hardware is essentially the perfect setup for the work that I do. Generally the apps that I use are pretty light and I find the 13.3 inch Macbook Pro to be pretty zippy. Probably the only thing that would be a good upgrade would be from the 22-24 inch monitor to maybe 2-22 inch monitors.

What does your setup look like? What kind of hardware do you use?

Embeddable Tweets

2010-05-05T02:14:00-04:00

Twitter now allows you to Embed a Tweet, all you need is the url of a tweet, like http://twitter.com/mgrouchy/status/13429079254, and you can use Twitters [Blackbird Pie](http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/ app to embed the tweet in your website like below:

This is me tweeting about how you can embed tweets, is this embedded?less than a minute ago via TweetDeckMike Grouchy
mgrouchy

Here is the Source:

Its kind of interesting, Blackbird Pie just generates a html/css snippet that you can embed in your page. I am not sure if I prefer this way of doing things or the way github does it with cross site javascript.

What do you think?

A New Blog A New Beginning

2010-04-30T00:00:00-04:00

So as you can tell this all looks a bit different. This blog that you are currently reading is completely static. All of this post content is actually written in markdown and then generated as static html by Hyde. As you can tell some of the css is off and this blog isn't overly full featured. I'm considering this a work in process and a little project to import my css skills as well as a fun little thing I can work on, on the side. I will probably write a post about how to get started with hyde for people interested in trying it out.

I decided that with this new blog its a completely fresh start, I haven't carried over any of the old posts from my old blog and I could care less about the google juice I am losing because of that. In this new incarnation of the blog, I'm hoping I will post a little more consistently as well as bring a tighter focus. I have had mikegrouchy.com for 6 years and it has been a blog that entire time, but there hasn't been a lot of great content. I plan on bringing back some of my old tutorial posts that people used , but probably update them a bit which hopefully will be an improvement.