I’m in the middle of moving OpenMRS’s web presence from a shared virtual machine to a new dedicated box.  The only trouble I ran into was with the mysql python module (again).

For posterity’s sake, I’m going to write my solution here.

easy_install mysql-python

I received this error when trying to install the MySQLdb-python module into python on centOS:

_mysql.c:2808: error: expected declaration specifiers before ‘init_mysql’
_mysql.c:2886: error: expected ‘{’ at end of input
error: Setup script exited with error: command ‘gcc’ failed with exit status 1

The fix I remembered.  I just had to install the python development packages:

yum install python-devel

I then had another very odd and strangely familiar error:

In file included from _mysql.c:35:
/usr/include/mysql/my_config.h:15:28: error: my_config_i386.h: No such file or directory
error: command ‘gcc’ failed with exit status 1

Googling around gave me nothing helpful…in fact the results looked strangely familiar as well.  I couldn’t remember the solution to this one though.

Eventually, I actually read the error message and realized that our new vm isn’t an x64 box.  For some reason there was a my_config_x64.h file in /usr/include/mysql but there wasn’t a my_config_i386.h.  Luckily, that file was present on the old server. Copying that file from /usr/include/mysql on the old box to the new was the cure.

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…are the shortcuts.

I’ve been using control-shift-t extensively since Darius first showed it to me a few months ago.  It will let you quickly find and jump to a java class across your current workspace.  (There is also an Open Type button by default in eclipse that you can use.)

I’ve always wanted a way to do the same except with our jsp, xml, and properties files.  I know most of the names of files and know where they are, I’m just lazy.  I want to be able to jump to them without having to expand the whole tree.

Well, Open Resource to the rescue!  Control-shift-r works just like the Open Type except with nonjava files.  Woot!

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Leslie’s recent Google Open Source post highlighted a few students from some other GSoC 2008 projects.  One of whom was Filippo Bollini. She hightlighted one of his typical weekly updates for his MySQL mentor: http://www.filippobollini.it/soc/?p=4. The details he put into the post included his thought patterns for the week, what was accomplished, and what is planned for the coming week.  Filippo sets the bar pretty high, but I think my student, Upul, is up to the challenge.  I would hope all of the other OpenMRS GSoC 2008 students also strive for this kind of detail! :-)

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…is that most of the other users of Eclipse are also software developers.  I’d bet that 75% of the users of Eclipse are capable of writing a plugin for it.  This is part of the reason there are tons of eclipse plugins, as I’ve talked about before.

Yesterday I was lamenting the fact that Eclipse doesn’t have a middle-click-closes-tab functionality as Firefox does.  It finally disturbed me enough to go and do a quick google search for it.  Lo and behold, out of those many other Eclipse-loving programmers out there, one of them felt as I did.

I now have the ability to close my tabs with a simple middle click thanks to Andriy Palamarchuk and the middle click closes tab plugin.

Plugin site: http://www.hlsoft.com/clickclosestab_eclipse
Plugin update url for eclipse: http://update.mousefeed.com/

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My favorite budgeting tool has just been taken out of beta and I feel like helping announce it.  PearBudget is the easiest budgeting software out there.  It gives you a simple online categorical budget.  There aren’t any overwhelming options and you can make as many or as few categories/tags as you wish.  My only gripe turned praise for it was that there wasn’t a way to automatically import my credit card transactions.  However, according to their FAQ, this is very intentional — the less automatic the budgeting is, the less automatic the spending becomes.

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