Mercurial, Eclipse, Hard Links

For one of my major projects, I use Mercurial for version control, and Eclipse with PyDev for my primary development environment.  I frequently clone a development trunk to create new development branches (usually one per feature set I’m working on at a time).  I had a little hiccup of paranoia about what it means to [...]

Schema management with SQLAlchemy

At work I’m developing a database system for tracking quantum mechanics calculations. It’s been done before, but a) this focuses more on job tracking than job submission and analysis, b) it’s really more about the command-line side of things with a web-based search, c) it’s more about some home-grown dynamics calculations than general-purpose “QM [...]

Un-quarantine downloaded files on OS X

Though I agree in principle with the idea of marking downloaded files as hazardous, it can be quite annoying when, say, extracting piles and piles of W3C documentation for future reference — especially when opening some index.html pops up a dialog box about a downloaded application. The “downloaded application” marker OS X puts [...]

Automatic Backup of USB Drive

I’ve started to keep some regularly-updated critical information on my USB thumb drive. Apple’s Time Machine doesn’t seem to be willing to back up external disks (or at least VFAT-formatted external disks). I figured I’d piggyback on Time Machine’s hourly backups by using rsync to copy the thumb drive periodically to my MacBook’s [...]