Monday, September 27, 2010

World map with users in real time

This site has a worldmap showing users in real time: http://www.worldcorrespondents.com/google-doodle-happy-12th-birthday-google/8812323

Thursday, September 16, 2010

MD5 checksum utility

A little MD5 CHeck sum utility to check the integrity of a downloaded file is available at fourmilab.
I just pasted the md5.exe in my download folder. And from a DOS command prompt, the command "md5.exe filetoanalyse" will return the checksum. For example:
C:\user\Downloads>md5.exe py2exe-0.6.9.win32-py2.6.exe

Returns
F05FD1F17B1473A13E1919D6D7FA0B08 py2exe-0.6.9.win32-py2.6.exe

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Virtual Python

What It Does

virtualenv is a tool to create isolated Python environments.

The basic problem being addressed is one of dependencies and versions, and indirectly permissions. Imagine you have an application that needs version 1 of LibFoo, but another application requires version 2. How can you use both these applications? If you install everything into /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages (or whatever your platform's standard location is), it's easy to end up in a situation where you unintentionally upgrade an application that shouldn't be upgraded.

Or more generally, what if you want to install an application and leave it be? If an application works, any change in its libraries or the versions of those libraries can break the application.

Also, what if you can't install packages into the global site-packages directory? For instance, on a shared host.

In all these cases, virtualenv can help you. It creates an environment that has its own installation directories, that doesn't share libraries with other virtualenv environments (and optionally doesn't use the globally installed libraries either).

Monday, September 06, 2010

Google Map competitor

Map24 Looks very similar to google maps. The interface makes it possible to move the point of view, much like in Google earth.

The same company also has a different interface on the website Navteq.com in my region it shows traffic data for a lot more roads than google map does. I wonder how this is possible.