# This is common
export WORKON_HOME="$HOME/.virtualenvs"
# This is uncommon, for non-default python installations
export PYTHON27="$HOME/local/python-2.7.4/bin"
export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON="${PYTHON27}/python"
export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_SCRIPT="${PYTHON27}/virtualenvwrapper.sh"
export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_VIRTUALENV="${PYTHON27}/virtualenv"
export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_VIRTUALENV_CLONE="${PYTHON27}/virtualenv-clone"
# And back to common (_lazy only loads the environment when you workon the first time)
source "${PYTHON27}/virtualenvwrapper_lazy.sh"

With that in place, you can use your system python with impunity, then switch to a custom-python virtualenv with the usual workon someproject call, rather than messing around with the PYTHONPATH and so forth.

#

It’s pretty much the same thing with server security. Most attacks on servers are wide-cast nets, looking for obvious vulnerabilities and brute-forcing passwords; the people controlling these botnet-powered scans aren’t concerned about getting into your server, they just want to get into lots of servers. Anyone who is being specifically targeted needs a high degree of security expertise and likely outside support to fend off attacks, but for the rest of us, best practices will generally keep things pretty safe: keeping software up to date, following best practices about firewalls, using a password manager, and turning on two-factor authentication everywhere it is possible to do.

Thankfully, that last point is getting easier. The Google Authenticator project provides client (iOS, Android, Blackberry) packages which work with more and more compliant systems – including Google, of course – and a server (Unix PAM) package to allow securing ssh (or sudo, or ssh only for users with sudo, or…) accounts with two-factor authentication. There is a WordPress plugin (thanks, Alex) to require it on your blog, and Amazon’s AWS and Dropbox both implement it for account access.

Start using two-factor authentication now, and encourage your favorite web services to implement it as well – it’s really, really easy to set up, and it is one of the most effective deterrent systems currently available for login security.

The thing that you always need to remember about depression – and which Benjy mentions – is that depression is not something which you can reason with. Depression isn’t a feeling. It’s not a way of thinking, or a way of viewing the world. It’s not something that you can choose not to suffer from. It’s a part of how your brain works.

The thing that anyone who suffers from depression needs to know is that it’s a disease, and that it’s treatable. It doesn’t matter if your friends are nice to you. It doesn’t matter if you know that they love you. That kind of thinking – that kind of reasoning about depression – is part of the fundamental trap of depression.

So true. Also:

When I started taking antidepressants, it was almost frightening, because it changed the world so much. Antidepressants didn’t make me happy. In fact, for a while, they made me very sad, because I was realizing how awful I’d been treating my wife and daughter.

Antidepressants aren’t “happy pills” any more than tylenol are “pleasure pills”. They (when they work properly) remove something that gets in the way of happiness – but that same thing is also in the way of curiosity, of contentment, of sadness – of feeling, and having those feelings be real and normal and work properly.

If you’re depressed, get treatment. People don’t sit around and try to deal with a broken leg. They shouldn’t sit around and try to deal with a broken brain either.

#

I read an article recently exhorting people to learn to do something in the next year well enough to astonish other people. I thought about that for a long time, and I realize that we do, regularly. Sitting still (at least intellectually) does not sit well, so we find new skills, work on them until we know them well enough to really make a judgement, and then stick with them or pass them by as we feel – but many of these skills are simply astonishing to other people, despite how simple they are in practice.

So…Rather than that, I’m going to try to learn how to do something well enough to astonish myself. Don’t know what, yet. Perhaps I’ll finally get around to learning to play the piano, though.

May your new year be filled with joy, faced with bravery, and seen with love.

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets credit.”

but the article is full of a rich texture and depth of exploration of that simple phrase as applied to engineering.

#

Now you have to install XQuartz instead; also install a non-clang gcc-4.2. Then:

CC=/usr/local/bin/gcc-4.2 CPPFLAGS=-I/opt/X11/include rvm install 1.8.7

#

#

#

brew rm macvim
brew install macvim

The upgrade to Mountain Lion changed the system Python environment sufficiently to cause vim to crash (with an unhelpful “ImportError: No module named site” message to stderr) if you try to execute python, for instance by triggering Gundo.

(This may also affect things that use Ruby bindings, such as the Command-T fuzzy-file-finder plugin. I ran into the Python issue first, and after reinstalling macvim, Command-T works fine.)

Edit: As observed below, if you have a homebrew version of python installed, you may need to unlink it while rebuilding macvim.