Noemi Millman: Triopter: Category Archives for "os x"

Django is in fairly heavy development, heading for a 1.0 release, and not only does there seem to be a lot of new functionality in the newest versions, but some of the older functionality is expected to break.

Since word on the mailing list is that development versions are not only quite stable, but actually recommended over the stable version, and since I don’t have any deployed apps to worry about breaking, I thought it would be better to upgrade now than later.

Even better, this will make future upgrades as simple as a single subversion command (and, well, some fixes for …

Today at work, I learned how to install Perl modules using CPAN. It’s a lot easier than I thought.

You see, for the past couple of years, I’ve been a bit frustrated because OS X does not come with a whole lot of Perl modules pre-installed, and for all I googled, I couldn’t find an “idiot’s” guide for moderately-savvy-but-not-expert users like myself to install modules and dependencies on demand.

The only instructions I could find point to Fink, which basically installs modules in a path that isn’t included in the Perl @INC variable (which I still haven’t figured out …

Yeah, that’s quite a mouthful.

I decided a couple weeks ago that I wanted to learn Django as well as Ruby on Rails. Django is a little bit less trendy, but seems to have more flexibility, and gives you an entire admin section of your app “for free”, as opposed to RoR, for which there are a zillion different ways to hack on user management, and no sense of “best practices” for a novice.

Django requires an up-to-date installation of Python, and a number of other dependencies, including a database API for Python. The best installation …