veni vidi Scripsi

Recipe: Snert

Sun, 10 Nov 2019 10:54:00 GMT

Snert? Erwtensoep?

Snert or 'erwtensoep' is one of the few traditional Dutch meals. The Dutch unfortunately aren't known for their great cuisine. This is probably partly due to the lack of tasty things that grow here.

Some of the traditional meals I really enjoy are 'raw' herring, kibbeling (a bit like fish and chips, but smaller) and stamppot. Stamppot is a category on its own, which usually consists of a vegetable mashed with potatoes and meat. A few examples are: boerenkool (curly kale mash), zuurkool (sauerkraut - my personal favourite) and hutspot (a mash of carrots, onion and potatoes). There's a great story behind the hutspot, but that's for another post.

Snert or erwtensoep is another one of my favourites. It's traditionally served on a very wintery day when all the rivers have frozen over. There's nothing that beats a full bowl of snert after you've been ice skating outside in the cold sun with your family and friends!

Unfortunately due to the current climate the weather conditions are rarely good enough to go ice skating, so I now make snert even when it's 10C outside...

The following recipe is a mix of a recipe from an old cookbook that my mum uses, other recipes on the internet and my own tweaks.

Ingredients

Makes roughly 6 portions.

400g Split peas
350g-400g Ham hock
200g Baby back pork ribs
2 Bay leaves
Pepper
Salt
Thyme
1 Onion, diced
1 Large carrot, diced
1/2 Celeriac, diced
2 Medium sized floury potatoes, diced
1 Leak, in rings
Clove powder
Vegetable stock powder for 1L of stock
Celery leaves, chopped small
Parsley, chopped small
Smoked sausage

Warning: not for kids!

A quick word of caution: do not feed this soup to (small) children. It can contain small bits of bone which can be dangerous to children.

Instructions

Rinse the peas well and remove any stones. Add them to the bottom of the slowcooker.

Add the ham hock and the baby back pork ribs to the slowcooker and season them with pepper, salt, thyme and the bay leaves.

Note that my ham hock is nearly twice as large as I would normally get, so the slowcooker is already quite full. The butcher had to get it from the freezer and chop the frozen ham hock in two, but it was still too big. That's what you get for doing grocery shopping on Friday evenings.

Dice the onion, carrot, potatoes and half of a celeriac and add them to the slowcooker. Fortunately I had half a celeriac in the freezer left over from a beef stew.

Cut the leak in rings and add them to the slowcooker as well. This is usually the point where I add a couple of pinches of clove powder and the vegetable stock powder but they can also be added together with the parsley and celery leaves, or when seasoning the meat.

Chop the parsley and celery leaves and add them to the slowcooker. My slowcooker is now practically overflowing, hopefully yours will be a bit less full. Remember I had quite a bit more meat than usual. Of course it also depends on the volume of the slowcooker. Ours is a 3.5L model if I'm not mistaken.

Finally add boiling water until the contents are not quite completely submerged. I now set our slowcooker on high for about half an hour to an hour and then turn it to low.

Unfortunately our slowcooker is a newer model and runs too hot. This means we have to frequently stir the contents once it's boiling to prevent them from burning to the bottom of the pot.

After about 8 hours total the snert should be done, you can turn the slowcooker to 'keep warm' mode now.

Serving

Before serving the snert you will have to fish out all the meat from the pan. This can be a bit tricky because it should all come apart really easily. Be careful to remove all the bones and remove the fat. Also remove the bay leaves if you can find them.

Before adding the meat back to the pot use a potato masher to mash the soup into a proper soup. Note that it doesn't have to be completely smooth. It's supposed to be a hearty soup.

Break up all the meat and add it back to the pot. Give it a final stir to really incorporate the meat into the soup.

Heat up the smoked sausage according to the instructions on the packaging before you serve the soup (usually: heat the sausage 20 minutes in its inner plastic wrapper in a pan of just boiled - not boiling - water). Cut the sausage into slices and add them straight to your serving.

Eet smakelijk!

Notes

This time I decided to pre-soak the peas the night before. This means the peas are a lot more voluminous than usual, making the pot more full. The soup turned out a bit more watery than usual, so I would recommend adding less water if you pre-soak the peas. Traditionally the soup should be thick enough that a spoon should be able to stand upright in it. I will definitely soak the peas again next time I make the soup. For some reason I have a hard time digesting legumes and soaking the peas meant that I had zero issues afterwards which makes it a big win for me.

About the meat: I tried my best to find the right translation for the meat. However the Dutch cut their meat differently from the British, so it was a bit of a challenge to find the right equivalent. The ham hock is the same cut as in Dutch. Sometimes we use a 'kneecap' instead, but I prefer to use the ham hock. The baby back pork ribs I'm not entirely sure of. We call them 'vleeskrabben' and they are a type of rib, I'm just not entirely sure which type. By comparing photos on the internet to what I bought, I landed on baby back pork ribs.

Traditionally snert isn't cooked in a slowcooker, however I find it a lot easier than putting a pan on a stove for a couple of hours.

Six portions is obviously way too much for just the two of us, but you can easily freeze the leftovers (without the sausage) and reheat them in pan at a later time. Note that it's quite hard to reheat the soup straight from frozen, so it is recommended that you defrost the soup in the fridge 24 hours prior to reheating it. It also tends to thicken a bit more in the freezer so add a tiny bit of water to make it slightly more fluid if necessary. Don't forget to add a 'fresh' smoked sausage to your leftovers!

How I Recovered from a Corrupt Git Repository

Fri, 31 Oct 2014 12:07:00 GMT

How my Git repository got corrupt in the first place

Ok, so how my Git repository got corrupt was (sort of) entirely my own fault. And why it was a problem was definitely entirely my own fault.

I had two stashes in my repository and decided for no apparent reason to pop the second stash straight after popping the first stash. Git told me there were conflicts in the second pop. I decided that I shouldn't really have popped them straight after each other (lesson #1 here) and decided to restore a Time Machine backup to get to the state where both stashes were still stashed. And that's where things went horribly wrong (lesson #2).

After restoring the Time Machine backup I couldn't get a tree view in GitX (my GUI of choice). I did a git status and that was fine, then tried to switch branch and that was not so fine. I got a fatal: unable to read tree {commit hash}. Then I did a git fsck and it turns out I had a lot of missing/ broken links.

I Googled some and found several Stackoverflow questions about this topic (this one described my situation best), but didn't really find a solution. Some suggested that it had something to do with the .git folder not being restored, but deliberately restoring it didn't help. I read something about packed and unpacked objects I couldn't really work out how that would fix my problem.

Why it was a problem for me

In short: I had a local branch that hadn't been pushed to anywhere that contained a lot of work, so I couldn't just clone from somewhere and be done. Lesson #3: regularly push your branches to some other (remote) repository while you're working.

How I finally (mostly) recovered from it

Like I said: I couldn't find anything that worked for me on the internet, so in the end I did the following:

Move the corrupt repository to somewhere else;
Re-clone the repository (master) from a remote repository (this repository obviously didn't contain my local branch);
It turns out that the new clone only contained packed objects in the .git folder;
I copied all the unpacked objects (the folders 00 - FF in .git/objects/) from my corrupt repository over to the new clone;
Then I also copied over my local branch in .git/refs/heads/ to my new clone.

I then tried to check out my local branch and that worked, however when I did a git status a lot of files had been staged for deletion. I had no idea what was going on there so what I did next was:

Push my branches to a remote repository;
Move this repository to a temporary location in case I might need it again;
Re-clone again from this remote repository.

I've not got my stashes back, but there wasn't much work in them anyway and I probably could get them back if I tried. I did manage to get back the most important thing: the local branch with the huge amount of work in it.

What I've learned

Three things really (in order of importance):

Regularly push your local stuff to a (remote) repository;
Don't pop your stashes one after the other, examine the changes being applied first (I might also ask myself: should I be using stashes this much? And isn't using Time Machine to correct your Git stuff really hackish and prone to problems?);
You cannot rely on Time Machine to restore your Git repository correctly for you (which goes hand in hand with no. 1).

Disclaimer

The reason I didn't regularly push my branch to a remote repository was that this branch could not yet be merged with master and therefore frequently had to be rebased on the master branch. Pushing this branch to a remote repository, then rebasing it on master and trying to push it again is usually a bad idea. However it can be done and since I'm not going to share this branch with anyone it would probably have been a better idea to do it anyway.

Upgrading the Mac from Snow Leopard / Lion to Mavericks

Wed, 02 Apr 2014 15:53:00 GMT

In October 2013 I upgraded both my work Mac running Lion and my home Mac running Snow Leopard to Mavericks. Here's a report of the problems I ran into.

Creating a bootable USB no longer works as easily as it did for Mountain Lion: http://www.oddzuki.com/bootable-os-x-mavericks-usb-flash-drive-9999-error-fix/;
On my home Mac running Snow Leopard I wanted to do a clean install. It turns out this isn't an option in the install process, instead you have to wipe your drive/partition first and then start the installation process;
Admin password problem (didn’t notice lock), only occurred once;
My keyboard lay-out at the login screen somehow got stuck on Dutch, even though Dutch people never use that lay-out in the first place (they use US Internatial with Dead Keys) and I'm a Dvorak typist. After some waiting and searching I found the fix: edit the system keyboard lay-out file (the user file stayed on Dvorak after I changed it) /Library/Preferences/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist to match ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist (obviously after you've set it to your preferred lay-out). I experienced some edit issues: unlock symbol didn’t work, I tried to delete the file (did not recreate it), sudo open, sudo xcode, sudo su open, sudo chmod 777, sudo chown heleen:staff, none of these worked. What did work in the end was: move the file to home folder, chown heleen:staff, chmod 777, edit, move back, chown root:wheel, chmod 644;
On my work Mac I still have problems where it doesn't come back from sleep mode, but these issues already existed before the upgrade. Also, mouse click back from sleep no longer works. You have to use a keyboard stroke;
Python segfaulted at every possible command (even python 3+2 seemed to segfault). The solution is this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18768967/python-segmentation-fault-11-on-osx;
In Mac's Apache PHP & virtualhosts were no longer enabled: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6790568/how-do-you-get-php-working-on-mac-os-x-lion-10-7/6790666#6790666 & http://foundationphp.com/tutorials/vhosts_leopard.php;
Virtualbox host-only networks don't work: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8940#comment:13;
Clang errors:
- Make sure you've installed all extra updates via Mac Software Update (this will include an XCode update);
- Don't forget to accept the Licence Agreement in XCode (either start XCode or type ac in the terminal): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20081883/configure-error-c-compiler-cannot-create-executables-with-mavericks
- If you get a clang: error: unknown argument error use: ARCHFLAGS=-Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future pip install fabric (where pip install fabric is whatever command you were trying to run), http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22312583/cant-install-mysql-gem-on-os-x
Somehow my Maven had disappeared (you get a -bash: mvn: command not found error when you type mvn --version), apparently Apple uninstalled it, this doesn't always happen I don't think. Anyway, there are two ways to install Maven:
1. Use the instructions on the Apache website (this is what I did): http://maven.apache.org/download.cgi (chapter: Unix based operating systems). Be sure to put all the export commands in your .bashrc instead of executing them in the terminal because the latter didn't work for me;
2. Use Homebrew.

I believe that's every problem I ran into. I may update it in the future. If you have questions feel free to send me an e-mail (e-mail address under my name at the bottom of the page).

Installing & Running Plone 4.3 on Mac OS X Mavericks

Mon, 20 Jan 2014 15:53:00 GMT

So, I'm finally getting to know Plone. We will be using it for the company website and I should be getting a short training in working and developing with Plone so I can take on the maintenance of the website after delivery.

I had some extra time to delve into Plone before the training and I have to say: Plone definitely has a steep learning curve. It toke me forever just to get it up and running (not being familiar with zc.buildout doesn't help). Just now I had to help my colleague getting everything up and running and he ran into many of the same problems as I did, so I thought I'd document the process for future reference.

My coleague started with using the default packaged installer, but then couldn't get it running (something wrong with port numbers). So I suggested he'd try the 'developer' buildout install, which is what I used as a reference. So, let's get started.

Preparations

Make sure you've got XCode installed;
Install pip, use the instructions in the documentation;
Install virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper (the latter is not strictly necessary, but will make your life a lot easier):
```
sudo pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper
```
I have a special folder in my system where I keep all my virtualenvs together (in /Volumes/DATA/virtualenvs - yes, I have 2 partitions on my Mac - ). If you have the same you can use the following code in your .bashrc to be able to quickly start (source) virtualenvs. This code also makes sure that pip only works when a virtualenv is active (you will not be able to install Python modules in the global site-packages folder using pip unless you disable that line in .bashrc):
```
##### PIP/Virtualenvwrapper config ############################################
export PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV=true
source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh
export WORKON_HOME=/Volumes/DATA/virtualenvs
###############################################################################
```
Don't forget to resource your .bashrc:
```
. ~/.bashrc
```
Create a virtualenv for your Plone installation:
```
cd /Volumes/DATA/virtualenvs
mkvirtualenv plone
```
The virtualenv is automatically activated when you create it. To deactivate it type deactivate. To start (activate) it when it's not active type workon plone (here's where the .bashrc/virtualenvwrapper magic comes in, you can do this wherever you are on the system).

Installing Plone

Everything from here on is done with the virtualenv active.

Now install ZopeSkel:
```
pip install 'ZopeSkel<2.99'
```
Go somewhere on your system where you would like Plone to live (this does not have to be in your virtualenv, in fact I prefer very much to keep them separated) and do:
```
paster create -t plone4_buildout myplonefolder
```
When it asks for the version number the default is 4.1. This is NOT the latest version. Please type in 4.3 (or the latest version number which you should be able to find on the Plone website). It has now created a folder myplonefolder with some necessary buildout files.

Go into the new folder and run:

python bootstrap.py

Now you might run into the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "bootstrap.py", line 97, in <module> pythonpath = ws.find(pkg_resources.Requirement.parse(requirement)).location
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'location'

To solve this you have to install distribute and rerun python bootstrap.py:

pip install distribute

Now run the following (this will take a while):

bin/buildout

And again you might run into errors, mainly the following:

Remove dumppickedversions:

While:
Installing.
Loading extensions.
Error: Buildout now includes 'buildout-versions' (and part of the older 'buildout.dumppickedversions').
Remove the extension from your configuration and look at the 'show-picked-versions' option in buildout's documentation.

Solve this by editing buildout.cfg and removing (or commenting out) buildout.dumppickedversions from extensions on line 26 and rerun bin/buildout:

extensions =
    mr.developer
#   buildout.dumppickedversions

ZopeSkel version conflict:

Got zopeskel.dexterity 1.5.2. While:
Installing zopeskel.
Error: There is a version conflict. We already have: ZopeSkel 3.0b3 but zopeskel.dexterity 1.5.2 requires 'ZopeSkel<=3.0dev'.

Solve this by editing the buildout.cfg file and adding <=3.0dev to ZopeSkel on line 83 and rerun bin/buildout:

[zopeskel]
recipe = zc.recipe.egg
eggs =
    ZopeSkel<=3.0dev
    PasteScript
    zopeskel.dexterity

Starting Plone

Finally you can start plone by running the following command from the Plone folder:

bin/instance fg

By using fg you make it run in the foreground so you get error messages in the terminal.

You no longer need your virtualenv active for this. The virtualenv Python interpreter is defined at the start of instance so it actually uses the virtualenv even if it's not active when you run instance.

You might get an error about an 'unknown locale: UTF-8'. You can solve this by adding the following to your .bashrc, sourcing .bashrc and restarting Plone.

export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

Resources

Recipe: Spinach, Tomato, Goat's Cheese, Potato & Egg Wraps

Tue, 24 Dec 2013 16:53:00 GMT

The other day we had some spinach left after using half of the 300g bag in a risotto and I wondered what to make with it. I wanted to finish it since we were going to be away for a couple of days and I didn't want to just bin it. Normally I use it in a curry, but we'd be going out for diner to an Indian restaurant, so that wasn't an option.

I remembered the wraps we made a while ago and thought we could make some wraps with the spinach. I cooked up my own recipe with the spinach and goat's cheese we still had left in the fridge and a hint from the web to use some tomatoes. I thought it was pretty delicious so here's the recipe.

Ingredients for 2 persons (makes 4 wraps)

150-200 grams of fresh spinach leaves
some goat's cheese (or use crème fraîche or cream cheese)
2 eggs
3 tomatoes, diced
a couple of potatoes (we used about 400 grams unpeeled)
4 wholemeal wraps
salt
pepper

Instructions

Peel the potatoes and boil them for about 20 minutes until they're done (follow the instructions if they come in packaging). Meanwhile boil the eggs in roughly 6-7 minutes (if you like them soft boiled like me, or longer if you prefer hard boiled eggs). In a frying pan fry the tomatoes for about 3 minutes, when ready add the spinach and fry until wilted in about 4 minutes.

Warm the wraps in the microwave according to instructions. Serve immediately.

We smeared the goat's cheese on the wrap first, then we mashed a potato (or two) on top. Add some pepper and salt. Add half of the boiled egg (you can mush it with the potato or just chop it up, whatever you like). Then add a quarter of the spinach-tomato mixture. Et voilà!

Update April 2nd, 2014

One day we forgot to buy the goat's cheese and discovered that we actually prefer these wraps with 4 eggs (1 whole egg per wrap) and about 2 teapoons of mayonaise per wrap. It makes the wrap feel more together, with the goat's cheese I feel the flavours are too far apart. We prefer to use Gouda's Glorie mayonaise (in a glass jar, not the squeezy plastic bottle) (or AH own brand glass jar if you can't find it) in case you happen to live in the Netherlands.

Mac OS X Apache Mass VHosts (with support for htaccess and symlinks)

Thu, 28 Nov 2013 12:39:00 GMT

A while ago I wrote two posts, one on using Twig and another on using htaccess with Mac's Apache. I was reasonably happy with the described setups until I discovered that when I used something like <link rel="stylesheet" href="/style.css" media="all"> in my HTML it wouldn't work because my site was running at the default http://localhost/~heleen/website/index.html and so it would map the 'root' slash to http://localhost/ rather than http://localhost/~heleen/website/. I found a solution to this using vhosts, which works really well. But then I had to add another website, and another, and realised that surely there should be an easier way to do this.

After some searching and trial and error I finally found my ideal setup. Unfortunately I couldn't execute the last step of the process (dnsmasq) because of some silly errors, but here's my PHP/Apache setup if you're interested (running Mac OS X 10.9 - Mavericks -).

If I've missed anything or if you have questions please don't hesitate to send me an e-mail (or comment once I've got the comments up and running).

Note

My language of choice is actually Python and for a motivation for setting this up in the first place I would like to refer to my Twig post.

Turn on Apache and PHP on your Mac

Turn on Apache:
- On Lion and below machines: turn Web Sharing on in your Mac's System Preferences Sharing. It will display the IP on where you can view the pages from your Sites directory. I don't know how this would work on Mountain Lion as they've removed that option from the sharing preferences;
- On Mountain Lion and above machines execute the following command sudo apachectl start;
Turn on PHP support in Apache by editing /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf and uncommenting the line:
```
LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
```
Create the PHP.ini file by going to /private/etc/ and doing sudo cp php.ini.default php.ini. I also turned debug mode on: search for display_errors in php.ini and make sure that Default Value is set to On.
Create a /Users/[your_computer_username]/Sites directory if it doesn't already exist;
If you'd like to run projects from other directories (like I do) I recommend simlinking to them from your Sites directory. However that does mean that you'll have to turn this feature on in Apache by adding FollowSymLinks to Options Indexes Multiviews in /etc/apache2/users/[your_computer_username].conf. See this Stackoverflow question; OR follow along and use the setup below in the Using Virtual Hosts section.
Restart Apache: sudo apachectl graceful.

Using Mass Virtual Hosts

This method makes adding websites to your Sites directory and running them a one action event. All you have to do is create (or symlink) the folder in the Sites directory.

Make sure that in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf the following lines are enabled (not commented out) (this requires Apache v1.3.6 or above (default in Mac OS X Mavericks is 2.2.24):

Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf

Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

LoadModule vhost_alias_module libexec/apache2/mod_vhost_alias.so

Make sure your /etc/apache2/users/[your_computer_username].conf consists of the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    UseCanonicalName Off
    VirtualDocumentRoot /Users/[your_computer_username]/Sites/%0
</VirtualHost>

<Directory "/Users/[your_computer_username]/Sites">
    Options Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

You will need the Directory directive to be able to use htaccess and symlinks.

Restart Apache: sudo apachectl graceful;

Now you can either install dnsmasq, a lightweight DNS forwarder and DHCP server, to do the domain/hostnaming automatically, or you can opt to add one step to the website installation: adding a line to /etc/hosts for each website.

Note

This setup writes all log entries to the default Apache log /var/log/apache2/. For custom logging you will have to search the internet yourself.

No Dnsmasq

If you opt for the latter all you need to do is add the following line to your /etc/hosts file for each website you add to your Sites folder:

127.0.0.1   [your-site-folder-name]

I usually use my-site.dev for the folder name and hostname.

Dnsmasq

You can also use Dnsmasq to manage the domains. It is normally installed via Homebrew on a Mac, however some strange behaviour on my Mac prevented me from installing Dnsmasq with it (it also wouldn't build from source). I have included some documentation, but for now I'm afraid you're on your own.

Resources

htaccess on a Mac

Apache + PHP Setup

VirtualHosts

Mass Virtual Hosts

Example VirtualHost Apache Configuration, this is the one I actually used;
Apache Virtual Host;
Apache Setup;
Apache Dynamic Virtual Hosts;
Apache Docs on Mass VHosts.

Dnsmasq

Getting htaccess to work on a Mac (Lion) with Apache and using symlinks

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:58:40 GMT

Edit (sudo) /etc/apache2/users/[your-username].conf:

Add DocumentRoot "/Users/[your-username]/Sites/" at the top of the file;
Add FollowSymLinks to the Options;
Change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All;
Change Deny from All to Allow from All.

Original:

<Directory "/Users/[your-username]/Sites/">
    Options Indexes MultiViews
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from All
</Directory>

New:

DocumentRoot "/Users/[your-username]/Sites/"
<Directory "/Users/[your-username]/Sites/">
   Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
   AllowOverride All
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from All
</Directory>

Restart Apache: sudo apachectl graceful

Resources

PIL, JPEG and Freetype support on Mac OS X Lion when using Virtualenv

Thu, 02 May 2013 11:04:03 GMT

Assuming you're using virtualenv and pip and working in your virutalenv ((your-env)username@computer:~$).

Download PIL, but do not install it:
```
$ pip install --no-install PIL
```

For Freetype support: edit setup.py in {your-virtualenv-folder}/build/PIL. On line 40 change FREETYPE_ROOT = None to FREETYPE_ROOT = libinclude('/usr/X11'):

# Library pointers.
#
# Use None to look for the libraries in well-known library locations.
Theme: Basic Nature

# Use a string to specify a single directory, for both the library and
# the include files.  Use a tuple to specify separate directories:
# (libpath, includepath).  Examples:
#
# JPEG_ROOT = "/home/libraries/jpeg-6b"
# TIFF_ROOT = "/opt/tiff/lib", "/opt/tiff/include"
#
# If you have "lib" and "include" directories under a common parent,
# you can use the "libinclude" helper:
#
# TIFF_ROOT = libinclude("/opt/tiff")

TCL_ROOT = None
JPEG_ROOT = None
ZLIB_ROOT = None
TIFF_ROOT = None
FREETYPE_ROOT = libinclude('/usr/X11')
LCMS_ROOT = None

# FIXME: add mechanism to explicitly *disable* the use of a library
# --------------------------------------------------------------------

Get libjpeg (choose any version, when I installed v9 was the latest):

$ curl -O http://www.ijg.org/files/jpegsrc.v9.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf jpegsrc.v9.tar.gz
$ cd jpeg-9/
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Install PIL:
```
$ pip install PIL
```

Done!

Resources

Installing Gettext on Mac OS X Lion

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 10:17:22 GMT

Just now I tried to use django-admin.py makemessages to create a language file and got the following error: /bin/sh: xgettext: command not found. After a search on my system it turns out I don't have gettext installed.

I did some searching and found mac-ports solutions, but I'm not a big fan of them. I tried compiling myself and got the following errors:

stpncpy.c:34: error: expected declaration specifiers or ‘…’ before numeric constant
stpncpy.c:34: error:    expected ‘)’ before ‘!=’ token

stpncpy.c:34: error: expected ‘)’ before ‘?’ token

make[3]: *** [stpncpy.lo] Error 1

make[2]: *** [install] Error 2

make[1]: *** [install-recursive] Error 1

make: *** [install-recursive] Error 1

I didn't give up though and eventually found this patch through this link: https://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/dports/devel/gettext/files/stpncpy.patch. And this worked, hurray!

Note

I downloaded gettext from http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/ and used version 0.18.1.1.

Oh no! I've Forgotten my Django Admin Password!

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 22:26:22 GMT

And here's how to reset it if you can still reach the installation via SSH or similar.

Start a Django shell:

python manage.py shell

Use the following code to change the password:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
u = User.objects.get(username__exact='[username]')
u.set_password('[fill in new password here]')
u.save()
exit()

That's all!

Sources

Quick Templating System for HTML Page Mock-ups (Mac OS X specific)

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 22:22:31 GMT

For the project I am currently working on at my job I needed to make some HTML page mock-ups. The HTML and CSS were already available within the current version of the website, I just needed to restructure the content a bit and make a few mock-ups of it to see what sort of issues we'd run into.

Initially I just copied the HTML and replaced the old content with the new content. Then I made another copy and replaced it with different content. I then realised what I needed was a tempting system. If I was going to make 10 pages and some basic thing changed I'd have to modify 10 pages which is just silly.

My requirements were the following:

It needed to be quick and easy and not overkill. I didn't want to have to install a whole framework like Django or Symfony;
It needed to be based on inheritance. Ever since I learned Django I'm in love with their inheritance templating system and I wouldn't have it any other way (read: includes);
It needed to be portable. I will probably have to share the HTML/code with other people and they should be able to run it in minutes.

So I searched around a bit and eventually landed on Twig. Now I'm not a big fan of PHP, you can read why HERE. But I (and my colleagues) work on a Mac which has PHP and Apache installed by default. You just need to turn it on.

The big plus of Twig is that it uses the same syntax as the Django templating system which means there was no learning curve for me. However my PHP was very rusty, so getting it up and running took a little longer.

How I made it work

Turn on Apache and PHP on your Mac

You can skip this if you've got it all set-up and running.

Turn Web Sharing on in your Mac's System Preferences Sharing. It will display the IP on where you can view the pages from your Sites directory. I don't know how this would work on Mountain Lion as they've removed that option from the sharing preferences;
Apache is turned on by default (at least it was on my Mac OS X Lion);
Turn on PHP support in Apache by editing /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf and uncommenting the line LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so;
Create the PHP.ini file by going to /private/etc/ and doing sudo cp php.ini.default php.ini. I also turned debug mode on: search for display_errors in php.ini and make sure that Default Value is set to On.
Create a /Users/[your_computer_username]/Sites directory if it doesn't already exist;
If you'd like to run projects from other directories (like I do) I recommend simlinking to them from your Sites directory. However that does mean that you'll have to turn this feature on in Apache by adding FollowSymLinks to Options Indexes Multiviews in /etc/apache2/users/[your_computer_username].conf. See this Stackoverflow question;
Restart Apache: sudo apachectl restart.

Using Twig 'Standalone'

I'm assuming you have a folder somewhere which contains both 'base' template HTML files and the actual 'content' HTML files which inherit the base files (and which I also, for the sake of convienience, have declared to be template files), which make use of the Twig templating system. Don't forget to create the simlink from the Sites directory to your project if you've not put them in Sites;
Download Twig and unzip;
Place the contents somewhere useful. It doesn't matter where, I put them in my Sites folder. As a side-note: the actual working bit is the Twig folder in lib in the extracted folder, the rest is docs and tests. I got this wrong at first so pay attention to this;
I created the following configuration/loader PHP file to run my HTML files through the tempting engine. I placed it in my project folder with the HTML files. Replace the $twigPath variable with the path to your own Twig install. More specifically to the Autoloader.php file. And finally point the $templatesPath to where you've stored your HTML files (step 1):

 1      <?php
 2  /* File: loader.php
 3   * Usage: loader.php?file=[filename] (without .html)
 4   * E.g.: http://10.169.32.11/~heleen/OAPDemonstrator/loader.php?file=pub_almelo
 5   * Don't forget to EDIT the CONFIG
 6   * Dependencies: Twig (http://twig.sensiolabs.org)
 7   */
 8      /*** Config ****************/
 9      $twigPath = '/Users/heleen/Sites/Twig/lib/Twig/Autoloader.php'; // Path to Twig's Autoloader
10      $templatesPath = '/Users/heleen/Sites/OAPDemonstrator'; // Path to your HTML templates
11      /***************************/
12 
13      require_once $twigPath;
14      Twig_Autoloader::register();
15 
16      // set up Twig
17      $loader = new Twig_Loader_Filesystem($templatesPath);
18      $twig = new Twig_Environment($loader, array( 'cache' => false));
19 
20      // parse the template
21      $template_file = htmlspecialchars($_GET["file"]);
22      $bindings = array();
23      $template = $twig->loadTemplate($template_file . '.html');
24 
25      echo $template->render($bindings);
26 
27  ?>

You are now ready to view your HTML pages. Go to your localhost URL which you'll find in Mac's System Preferences, Sharing, Web Sharing pane, and add loader.php?file=[html_filename] to the URL. So for example I got http://10.169.32.1/~heleen/project/loader.php?file=publication. That's it!

Note

To summarise my personal setup: Twig is in my Sites foleder. The Sites folder also contains a simlink to my project folder. My project folder containes both the loader.php, the HTML template files, and the content files which inherit the template files. To run it the url is: [path to Sites folder]/[project folder]/loader.php?file=publication.

Pretty URLs

Edit 14 May 2013: if you would like prettier URLs I can recommend using Apache htaccess. To get links like /publication.html instead of /loader.php?file=publication read my blog post to enable htaccess on the Mac and add a .htaccess file to your project root with the following contents:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ loader\.php?file=$1 [NC]

Sources

PHP & Apache

Twig

TinyMCE in one of multiple Textarea fields in Admin

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:34:56 GMT

When I was working with Django the other day I had a model which contained 3 textareas (models.TextField()). I only wanted 2 of the 3 to use TinyMCE for mark-up in the Admin. I worked out how to achieve this and here’s a quick guide.

Install TinyMCE as explained in an earlier post.
Make sure the tiny_mce folder, the one you downloaded from tinymce.moxiecode.com, is also in your site-media javascript folder (/[sitemedia]/js/tiny_mce/) or change TINYMCE_JS_URL in your settings.py to the correct folder.

In your settings.py define what you want the default tinymce to look like, for example:

TINYMCE_DEFAULT_CONFIG = {
         'plugins': "safari, spellchecker, save, advlink, iespell, paste, xhtmlxtras,",
         'theme': 'advanced',
         'theme_advanced_buttons1': "bold, italic, underline, strikethrough,|, justifyleft, justifycenter, justifyright, justifyfull,|, bullist, numlist,|, outdent, indent, blockquote,",
         'theme_advanced_buttons2':"undo, redo, |, link, unlink, anchor, cleanup, help, code, spellchecker",
         'theme_advanced_buttons3':"", 'theme_advanced_buttons4':"",
         'theme_advanced_toolbar_location' : "top",
         'theme_advanced_toolbar_align' : "left",
         'theme_advanced_statusbar_location' : "bottom",
         'theme_advanced_resizing' : 'true',
}

In your model admin file add from tinymce.widgets import TinyMCE and to the model’s admin class add:

def formfield_for_dbfield(self, db_field, **kwargs):
        if db_field.name == '[your_field_name]': # you can add more fields here by using 'or'
        kwargs['widget'] = TinyMCE(attrs={'cols':80, 'rows': 30})
        try:
                del kwargs['request']
        except KeyError:
                pass return db_field.formfield(**kwargs)
        return super([model_admin_class_name],self).formfield_for_dbfield(db_field, **kwargs)

Edit 20 Oct. 2011: It should be noted that in the new version of TinyMCE only the English language file is included with the 'simple' and 'standard' themes. When you use 'language':"nl" for example in your TINYMCE_DEFAULT_CONFIG you should go to the TinyMCE website and get the required languages and put them in the correct folder (tiny_mce/themes/simple/lang for example).

TinyMCE in Django

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:04:58 GMT

A while ago when I was working with Django I had a really hard time trying to figure out how to get TinyMCE to work in Django. Now it isn't difficult, you just have to know how to do it. So I've written a quick guide on how to make it all work.