So you wanna use Windows…

Those who know me are aware of the fondness I have for working with Windows in particular in the context of development. Whatever I think, however, many people choose, or are obliged, to develop on the platform. Depending on your chosen development tools, this can be more or less straight forward.

Consider this scenario: you’re a LAMP-stack developer (in this case, P is for Python). You’re going to be deploying to Linux in production and in test. You have mixed MacOS and Windows developers. The Mac (and Linux) guys have no trouble getting a dev environment built, but it can be a little trickier on Windows which is far less used by LAMP developers.

Windows peeps could change away from Windows but why should they add the switching cost of changing OS to all the rest? Clearly I think there are huge benefits, but I don’t usually like to tell people what to use, much as I myself don’t like being told what to use (yes, thank you, Eclipse is wonderful, but I’m really fast with Vi - I’ve worked with both). 

So, how do we get some of the basics setup? Here are the steps I took.

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Testing Paypal with sandbox

I’ve been testing out django-paypal with a view to using it on a new site. I was always quite against using Paypal - the ‘image’ doesn’t seem right and there are horror stories about non-existent customer service when they decide to stop accepting payments for you at seemingly arbitrary moments.

However, convenience wins sometimes, and the user experience (especially with Web Payments Pro) is pretty good. 

So having decided to try it out, you need to use the sandbox. This isn’t going to be a long tutorial, but a collection of gotcha-resolution points as I come across them.

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Toys of the week: pika and redis

Always interested in loose coupling and distributed processing I’ve finally got around to playing with Redis, the key-value store that has typed values and also provides pub/sub messaging. One value type is a list from which one can pop and to which one can push and I’ve been playing with this using the Python redis-py library. 

Redis is intriguing as it is an alternative, for some use cases, to my message bus solution of choice: AMQP, usually implemented by RabbitMQ. The Python AMQP libraries have always been a bit tricky to work with - not playing well with threads and not providing concurrency. pika, it would seem, is what I’ve been waiting for. Time to find out.

Android scripting environment →

Alpha project to provide scripting support in many languages including Ruby and Python on the Android platform, my latest toy. Look forward to playing with this.