john.parnefjord.se Reflections & findings

If you are planning to generate PDF:s programatically in Python you have most likely ran into ReportLab. This is an amazing toolkit to create PDF:s. ReporLab has an addon called renderPM that lets you generate images as well in different formats. When I tried to make a PNG-file I ran into an error with some fonts missing. The code I tried to run was just a simple snippet:

IBM ships most tools packaged just for Suse and RedHat, quite annoying when running Debian or Ubuntu isn't it? Anyway I've tried earlier to install Director on Debian, but I gave up after a while. It was an overweighty system and I just wanted to be able to monitor the server, especially the raid. After some searching I found the arcconf-tool via Adaptecs site. But after some more searching I found the IBM version.

I started using Python a while ago and one of the things I need to do is to be able to connect to Microsoft SQL server from Linux servers. I was a bit surpised that I could only find some relics from projects not alive any more or the commercial MxODBC from eGenix. Then I ran into pymssql and decided to give a try. It worked almost at once on my virtualized Ubuntu Gutsy test box.

First I installed the prerequisites: freetds and the python headers: