Today I’ve been thinking about building a database to keep up with IP address assignments.  In a perfect world I’d have a nice database with a clever interface and would simply start entering data.  In my world I see commercial versions (and I have no budget) and open source versions (which really want Linux distributions, which I don’t really have).  So I’m considering building a database and then using Python and PyQT to build the interfaces.

Most of my limited database experience in recent years has been with MySQL.  Sadly for me, OS X has replaced MySQL with PostgreSQL – so which would be better?  Well, I don’t know yet.  But I have found a resource about PostgreSQL that should be remembered, which can be found here.  It appears that Apple probably moved to PostgreSQL in order to put some distance between themselves and Oracle, who bought the rights to MySQL some time ago.

It appears that Python includes support for PostgreSQL.  More information can be found here.

More research on this topic to come!

This month I have an active subscription to cbtNuggets (http://www.cbtnuggets.com), a training site for IT stuff.  Once I finished my mission, I found that I have some time left in which I can learn something else.  Since there isn’t a course for git, I chose the next best thing:  a course in Python taught by Ben Finkel.

So far the material is basic and can be learned from many web sources, so I’m not repeating it here.  There are a couple chewy nuggets that I’d like to remember though – which is what this blog is about!

1. The online python documentation can be found at https://docs.python.org.
2. There is a library of python code and stuff located at https://pypi.python.org/pypi
3. Python 2.x is preinstalled on OS X (I love Apple!).  To find the version running on your Mac, use the command python –version or python -V at a command line.  Mine is running 2.7.6.
4. Launch python’s interactive mode from the terminal using the command python.
5. Execute a python program file from the terminal using the command python <filename>.

That’s all for tonight.  I’m off to beg my lovely financial officer for a copy of the UltraEdit Studio!