VmWare tip

This might be obvious to most, but it's easy for novice VmWare users to forget.

When you take a snapshot, VmWare has to write down the full current status of your image, including RAM. If you take a snapshot while the image is running, VmWare will have to save the full RAM content, which might run up to several GBs. If you take the snapshot after your image has properly shut down, RAM content will simply be discarded, and VmWare will only have to deal with the actual disk.

TL;DR: Always shut down your image before snapshotting, and you'll save a lot of disk space.

Encrypting and Decrypting SQLDeveloper 3 Passwords

Some Oracle products are fairly sweet, let's be honest. One of them is the revamped SQLDeveloper, which has finally caught up (mostly) with MSSQL Management Studio.

One of its best features is the ability to import and export list of connections via XML (right-click on Connections to find the relevant menu). The resulting file is very readable, and hence easily manipulable. The only opaque item is the encrypted password, but it turns out that they are not particularly hardened. This is what you have to do to be able to manipulate them for fun and profit.

1. Get Jython, or your favourite choice of JVM dialect that can work with jars. I picked Jython because 1) it's Python! and 2) Oracle ships it with most products, under oracle_common\util\jython.
2. Load ojmisc.jar and db-ca.jar. These can be found in different places depending on your SQLDeveloper version.
3. Import oracle.jdevimpl.db.adapter.DatabaseProviderHelper. That class has the two methods you need: goingOut (i.e. encrypt) and comingIn (i.e. decrypt).

So here's a complete Jython script for the Windows version of SQLDeveloper:

# set this to the path where you extracted SQLDeveloper
SQLDEV_ROOT = r'C:\sqldeveloper' 
# here's the real stuff
import sys
from os.path import join
sys.path.append(join(SQLDEV_ROOT,r'sqldeveloper\extensions\oracle.datamodeler\lib\ojmisc.jar'))
sys.path.append(join(SQLDEV_ROOT,r'sqldeveloper\modules\oracle.adf.model_11.1.1\db-ca.jar'))
from oracle.jdevimpl.db.adapter.DatabaseProviderHelper import goingOut as encrypt, comingIn as decrypt

if __name__=='__main__':
    print "Encrypted 'password': " + encrypt('password')
    print "Decrypted 'password': " + decrypt(encrypt('password'))

Oracle XE 11.2.0.2 + Oracle Client 11.2.0.1 = cannot "connect / as sysdba"

While having fun with some complicated (and likely illegal!) scenarios I won't go into now, I ended up this morning with an Oracle XE database to which I wanted to connect with the usual DBA routine:

sqlplus /nolog
connect / as sysdba

I kept getting the dreadful "ORA-12560: TNS:protocol adapter error" and couldn't understand why. Surely I didn't break it that much? The service was still up and I could connect regularly in every way except that.

It turns out this is what happens when you try to do too many things on the same machine. I had installed an Oracle Client on top, because I needed a few things from there (OleDB provider etc) and because other products are guaranteed to work with that client rather than XE.

The problem is that the sqlplus version that comes with the Client is older (!) than the one from XE, but because of how the Windows PATH system variable gets manipulated by the installer, the old version takes over and gives you this problem.

Solution? In your PATH, make sure the folder from the oraclexe directory comes before the one from any client you might have there. However, understand that this is likely to break your Client, so either make sure the change is temporary, or set it locally only when you need it (batch files!).

How to compile PyObjC for Python 3 on OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion

Another one for teh Google...

It so happens that I am curious about PyObjC, the Python bindings for Objective-C, which is the "native" language of choice for OSX/iOS.

As usual, my timing is completely wrong: recent versions of Xcode dropped support for PyObjC, and the project has shrunk to basically one person (that Ronald Oussoren I previously mentioned). The version on PyPI seems to work with Python 2.x only. Even the official page on Sourceforge is basically abandoned, and packages available from there are obsolete. This is a problem because I'm really trying hard to do everything with Python 3 these days, and the PyObjC version shipped with OSX 10.8 "Mountain Lion" is for 2.7 (the only Python version Apple ships and supports).

Luckily, from my past tribolations I knew that Ronald had his own repository on BitBucket, so I tried that and it worked fine. However, the documentation on how to build PyObjC from source is quite scarce (in fine geek tradition), and I had to figure out the following principles in the hard way:

• Ronald's repository is split into many separate packages that have to be individually built. This is very fine-grained, but a bit cumbersome for the general case.
• Do not use the setup.py script you'll find under /pyobjc . These are just for people pulling from PyPI, i.e. post-release.
• /pyobjc-xcode is obsolete, and there's nothing to build there.
• /pyobjc-framework-XgridFoundation simply refuses to build under ML. Xgrid is a somewhat obscure, proprietary Apple technology for highly-parallel computation. If you don't know what it is, chances are that you won't need it. I personally don't care about it.
• /pyobjc-core is a requirement for all other packages, so it should be built first.
• In order of importance, /pyobjc-framework-Cocoa, -Quartz and -CoreData are dependencies of other packages, so they should be built in this order before any other pyobjc-framework-*.
• Python 3 support is occasionally shaky. In one occasion, one file had to be patched to remove unicode literals (the u'mystring' notation from Python 2 that was dropped in Python 3.0), but that's just a temporary snag: Python 3.3 will reintroduce that syntax as a compatibility hack for exactly this type of situation. I've submitted a patch anyway, but if you can't wait for Ronald to consider it, it is available in the below-mentioned repository.
• Looking at BitBucket, I noticed there's at least one significant fork that is arguably targeting Python 3 more consistently. You might want to try that if Ronald's version is not good enough for you.

Because I don't plan to do this sort of work every day, I've put together a script so that I won't have to remember all this stuff when starting a new virtualenv environment. It's now available from my utils repo on BitBucket. There is no documentation but OMG IT'S FULL OF COMMENTS so there. As usual, any feedback is more than welcome.

How to run py2app on OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion and Python 3.2

This post is for teh Google and all poor souls trying to use py2app on Mountain Lion.

To make it short, the latest official release of py2app does not work with ML and Python 3.2, you have to get the current development snapshot. Unfortunately, py2app requires a number of smaller libraries written by his developer, Ronald Oussoren, and most of them have to be upgraded as well (and before you curse his name: he's single-handedly maintaining py2app, pyObjC and virtualenv-mac; what have you done recently for the community?).

So here's my recipe:

1. Clone all required repos.
   Oussoren uses Bitbucket, which is better accessed through Mercurial (hg); you can get hg from your favourite package manager (Homebrew/MacPorts/Fink/whatever).
   Then:

   hg clone https://bitbucket.org/ronaldoussoren/altgraph
   hg clone https://bitbucket.org/ronaldoussoren/macholib
   hg clone https://bitbucket.org/ronaldoussoren/py2app
   

2. Install the packages. Since you're basically tracking trunk, you should probably use the develop mode of setuptools:

   cd altgraph && python setup.py develop && cd ..
   cd macholib && python setup.py develop && cd ..
   cd py2app && python setup.py develop && cd ..

   Note that this means you'll have to keep these "source" folders available forever. If you don't like that, you should create an egg (e.g. python setup.py bdist_egg), then install it (easy_install dist/your-resulting.egg).
   
   For the record, altgraph will present itself as version 0.10, macholib as 0.7, and py2app as 1.5.
3. Now you should be able to run your python setup.py py2app

Bonus achievement: if you're using PyQt, this version of py2app will give you Retina-ready packages, by automatically adding the NSPrincipalClass key to the generated Info.plist and setting it to NSApplication. Nice one, Roland!