Cons: Two small blemishes on the back side of the cutaway, and the large plastic plate that holds the battery compartment (on the back) is missing one of four screws. It’s around here somewhere. This doesn’t cause anything to be loose in any way, as the black plate fits in very tightly – and in fact barely fits in the defined spot. Line 6 cut that one close, I guess.

I have a Line 6 power supply to go with the included “XPS Mini” direct/power box that comes with it.

Honestly, I’d love to fetch a full $450 for it.

Let me know what you think. Humans: Use the contact page.

You can see this new, with reviews, on Amazon. It comes with a working Line 6 XPS Mini DI/Power box (example seen here) for powering over a TRS cable (rather than batteries). I also have a Line 6 Power Supply (optional), if you don’t have one.

Note: To use the power supply and XPS Mini DI/Power (instead of batteries) you’ll need to use a “Balanced, TRS” cable, instead of a regular “mono” style guitar cable. Something like this.

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TLDR:

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 is very different from the flavors of Linux that I’m accustomed to working with (Debian/Ubuntu), and I ran into quite a bit of trouble getting Django installed. I can’t install packages myself, so it was even more slow going as every time I discovered I was missing something, I had to have a sysadmin do it for me.

Here’s the quick list of the packages that will get Django up and running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. Notice I’ve included MySQL. The database package you need may be different, and I’ll leave it up to you if you use something other than MySQL.

• python-mysql
• python-devel (Necessary for setuptools/distutils/easy_install later.)
• python-imaging (The “PIL”. You may need this later.)
• mysql-devel (For getting an up to date MySQLdb module, should you need it.)
• python-xml
• pyxml

For reference, here is the full package listing for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 2.

I wrote this just in case someone was unfortunate enough to have to go through this same process. Hopefully your search engine of choice will guide you here, and the next few hours of your life will be slightly less stressful than they could have been.

Read the details of my adventure “after the break”…

How to get Django 1.x running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (x86_64)

Maybe I’m spoiled, or still considered a “noob”, but I use Ubuntu Server for
several of my own projects, and I’m moderately familiar with the Debian style
Linux setup and package management (via apt-get). When I first started learning
Python, and when I downloaded Django (trunk, just before 1.0), I didn’t
encounter any trouble with missing bits of Python, or other packages.

At my day-job, I’m in the process of trying to get a Django project up and running
on an official development SLES/SUSE Enterprise server. This, of course,
to get everything going smoothly before attempting the same process on the
production server.

This all almost happened quite a while ago, except for the fact that I am not
in direct control of the servers in question. We have a sysadmin that has plenty of
things to do, and working with me to figure out what packages need to be
added to a development box just wasn’t worth the effort at the time. He doesn’t
mind installing packages that I need (via the graphical yast system), but because
of our service contracts, he doesn’t install anything that isn’t supported: which
is anything not found via yast. So that’s no big deal. The real problem is, until now,
I had no idea what packages I needed installed, as I’d never gone through this on
a SUSE system, and had no idea how they separated things.

Forward to the future. The project, at least its initial phase, is nearing developmental completion, and needs to go into official testing/acceptance mode.

Incomplete!

The directions you’ll see below are sparse, and do not fully detail the Django
installation process. At this time I’m only documenting the problems I came across,
as I’m still not yet completely familiar with the way Novell/SUSE splits up
their ‘packages’.

What version are you running?

Running `sudo cat /etc/SuSE-release` gives the following output:

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (x86_64)
VERSION = 10
PATCHLEVEL = 2

If I’m not mistaken, ‘PATCHLEVEL’ here indicates the Service Pack installed. At the time of writing, there is a Service Pack 3, but I believe this indicates that our current setup is still using 2.

The version of Python installed with SUSE Enterprise 10 is Python 2.4.2.

As you may know, Python 2.4 doesn’t come with native SQLite support, so
if you’re using that, you may have to install a separate package for SQLite support. We are currently using MySQL in Production for this project, so I of course
needed the `python-mysql` package.

Not so easy?

I like to use things like ‘pip‘ and ‘easy_install’, and thought that this
time I would take the easy route and even try out `easy_install django`. Alas, there was no `easy_install` available. Nor is distutils or setuptools available. For that, I eventually discovered I would need the package `python-devel`.

After installing `python-devel` I was able to get `easy_install` up and running. Only after I manually downloaded the `easy_install` package, and ran the required `python setup.py install`.

I was then able to install Django, even able to view the “Welcome to Django” page after running `pythong manage.py runserver [ip]:8080`.

Great!

So I quickly made my usual changes to the Django settings file, filling out the database information to match my tested-and-working MySQL database setup,
and attempted a the first `syncdb`.

Augh! I was getting exceptions about the wrong version of `MySQLdb` module. It seems that the Python module `MySQLdb` that you get with SUSE Enterprise 10 is “2.0.0″, and the error message clearly tells me that I need version “2.2.2“.

So, I thought I’d be clever and do `easy_install MySQL-python` (not “mysqldb”), which should install the updated version for me. Doing that started out looking good, but ended in errors similar to…

“mysql_config not found”

So back to the SUSE Package listings to find out where the heck this “mysql_config” program was. As it turns out, you have to install `mysql-devel` to get “mysql_config”, which will then allow you to manually install the newer version, via easy_install. With `mysql-devel` installed, you can finally run `easy_install MySQL-python` and it will work.

Admin and Auth

As most probably do, I use the built-in Admin and Auth systems, so I am prompted to create a Superuser for Django, during the first `syncdb`.

Right after giving the superuser name and password, I got the following exception:

‘ImportError: No module named xml.sax.saxutils’

Having never seen that before, I did some “Googling” around, and as any decently-adept Python user might do, I attempted to import the package from the Python command line, just to troubleshoot the problem.

Running `python`, and using `import xml` gave the following exception:

‘ImportError: No module named xml’

Man, that’s weird. Especially considering that the box is running Python 2.4.2! Checking the Python documentation showed that, of course, this was part of the Python Standard Library. But wait… Novell/SUSE decided to separate this from the main Python package. After I did a bit more “Googling” (other people having similar issues) and searching the package listings on the Novell website, I found that `sax.saxutils` is in the package `python-xml`.  I also noticed the `pyxml` package contains the path ‘site-packages/xml/’ so I had the sysadmin add them both, just to be thorough.

At this point, the Python interpreter can now successfully do `import xml`
as well as `from xml.sax.saxutils import XMLGenerator`, as Django was attempting.

From there, it seemed my Django installation was happy again, and I could move on.

Adding South

The next thing I wanted to add was South, to continue managing my database
migrations, at least during these last phases of development.

The `easy_install south` command seemed to work just fine, until actually
trying to do a migration. The release available at the time of writing time is ‘South 0.7.2′.

When I would attempt an actual migration, I was running into this exception:

[... snip ...]
File “/usr/local/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/South-0.7.2-py2.4.egg/south/db/generic.py”, line 129, in execute
get_logger().debug(‘south execute “%s” with params “%s”‘ % (sql, params), extra={
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/logging/__init__.py”, line 947, in debug
apply(self._log, (DEBUG, msg, args), kwargs)
TypeError: _log() got an unexpected keyword argument ‘extra’

Once again, Google to the rescue. Here’s the search I used:

+django +south TypeError: _log() got an unexpected keyword argument ‘extra’

That immediately led me to a South Trac Ticket with great comments
and explanation of the exact problem I was running into. Here’s the description on the ticket:

The logging module in python2.4 doesn’t accept the ‘extra’ kwarg. It is used here:

http://south.aeracode.org/browser/south/db/generic.py#L129

This causes all migrations to fail with an exception.

The problem had already been fixed, and there was a link the chageset code,
with a Milestone listed as ’0.7.3′ (so not yet in the available release). I took a look at the offending line of code and noticed that it was such a simple change, I just went and applied the differences directly to the file on the development server (the path is listed in the error output).

As of now, everything appears to be running fine.

I wrote this post based on only a brief log I was keeping while setting things up, to ensure we could reproduce the same steps on the production machine. If I’ve left out something obvious, critical, I’m sorry. I may have also overlooked something that would have made my life a lot easier – oh, well.

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This message was too big to post on Facebook, so here it is!

You may have heard that we’ll have a presence at this year’s International Goat Days Festival (http://www.internationalgoatdays.com/). The praise band will be playing on stage on Saturday, as well as at least 3 other Hands Team/performance groups, and I believe our Royal Rangers group will be participating in a camp-out (I’m fuzzy on those details).

Goat Days is September 10th and 11th (Friday, 5pm to 10pm, and Saturday, 7am to 10pm).

Lighthouse will have a booth at Goat Days with information about our Church, Revelation House, and even handing out some free water during the day on Saturday. The booth is *covered* and has electricity – so if it’s hot, there will be at least one electric fan blowing!

I’m trying to schedule some people to just be available at the booth on Friday, Saturday, or both, so that people can easily swap out, take breaks, go eat, leave, etc, without leaving the booth alone.

In addition to manning the booth, there is a need for volunteers that could periodically sweep through the Goat Days “Sit-a-spell” area (covered seating for elderly, eating, and just hangin’ out) and straighten chairs/remove garbage from tables. This is just a bonus,  but if you’re interested, that would be especially awesome, and the City of Millington will be very grateful. =)

If you know of a specific time slot (as few as 15 minutes) that you will be available on Friday and/or Saturday, please get in touch with me!

Also, feel free to pass this along to anyone that might be interested.

You can contact me via Facebook (send me a message!), emailing goatdays@tommygeorge.com, or by phone at 901-213-8669. If none of that sounds good, call the Church office at 901-873-3000 and let them know what time slot(s) you’d like to fill.

Thanks so much, I’m excited to see you there!

Tommy George

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“Why do you remain here even now?” She asked, sobbing. “Because, here is where you are,” the Lamb said softly, “And I long to be with you.”

A lyric from Showbread (@rawrock) from “The Beginning” on their album Nervosa.

I don’t like to be all poetic and such here, and therefore generally try to avoid posting lyrics and the like, but this stood out at the moment and I wanted to capture it right here.

On a side note, if you aren’t familiar with Showbread, I suggest you become that way. Their albums span a decent range of style, so I’m sure there’s something in their library for you.

Having the [legacy product] code to refer to is crucial to the database design work we’ll be doing on the new project.

It’s a bit like saying “Hey guys, obviously the old software isn’t meeting our needs, but let’s base our new, replacement idea on the old code”. That’s not going to be easy to do. In fact, I’d venture to say that the smarter, clearer way to go would be to take a good look at your current requirements, go over your use cases, and “user stories”, and start from scratch.

I’m willing to be 90% wrong here, in general cases, except for where my vagueness and ambiguity hides the real-life project to which I have direct knowledge.

Moving away from the technological view, and into your life -

Are you trying to compare your past to the present, in order to build the future?

Forgetting the past and taking a good inventory of the resources you currently have available is going to be the most stress-free way to move forward.

Of course you need to examine history to learn from your mistakes, and observe the way others have done things correctly. But when it’s time to move on to something new, it’s hardly ever good to use old material to build something new.

Old wine-skins, new patches, and all that.

[concerning the use of the internet, and social applications] … your users are already doing this, in your pews.

If they’re online, why aren’t they talking about you?

And one that ties it together, and prompts you to take this seriously:

The internet is a ‘web’ of links. With nothing to link to, even their mentions (of you) aren’t “sticky”.

Think about that.

I think I jotted those down while listening to an episode of Geeks and God.

And I remember, for some odd reason, the sound of someone stumbling to the bathroom in the middle of the night, fiddling around to find some noisy container, shaking something out of it, and heading back to whatever bed they crawled out of. (It was mostly the adults or grandparents – “the old people” – doing this).

Tonight, I found myself trying to quietly enter the bathroom, dig through the cupboard to find the headache medicine amongst the basket of once-used “pink stuff”, bug spray, allergy relief, etc; and to shake out just one of a crowd of those little pills, and quietly make my way back to the room.

Somehow, I found myself listening to all of these sounds from outside my own perspective and I realized what was happening: I now fully qualify for the “old person” award, given out by my 10-year-old self. Thanks, self.