Reader's list

Its been a while. Its a first day of summer here, and its a heavy rain outside. In the mean time I got to learn a new language, and even get two paid projects with it. Hopefully will finish one of them today. I really wanted to get away from perl and php madness (no offense, you two :-) ), so I really spent quite a bit of time learning python and django.
Just want to share some of the reading I found on the subject:

Learning Python the Hard Way by Zed Shaw

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ - you can get pdf for free, or get a hardcopy for real cheap. I found it really easy, interesting and efficient, especially for those who didn't code before or not familiar with python.

Django Book

http://www.djangobook.com/en/1.0/ - also free and awesome. Read it!

Also found this dude to be pretty awesome. Many custom, interesting, finely documented solutions.

Dustin Davis' Blog

http://www.nerdydork.com/

Custom Shell in NetBSD

I was making a little user shell, which is just a minimal TUI interface for the maintenance of my own software, and ran into problem on how to set it up for the actual user. Apparently here's what you should do if you want to have a different shell:

If its something you've made, just add it to /etc/shells
then run (as a root or sudo)

usermod -s /path/to/shell username

Software Installation

Installing software on NetBSD turned out to be quite an easy thing to do.
Thanks to a fabolous documentation these guys have. I've started here, and just followed the instructions:

http://netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/getting.html#getting-first

Well, reading never hurts. I really wanted to keep things to a minimum, therefore only installed the stuff I need:

* Apache
* Python
* mod_python
* PostgreSQL
* vim
* figlet

Actually I know, the figlet joke never gets old, but I installed it first thing just to test pkgsrc.

Welcome to NetBSD

Well, no-frills it is. After maybe like 20 minutes of installation I got a brand new system.
No big drama configuring it actually. Configured network, few other rudimentary things. Nothing exciting just yet.

What's that all for?

At this stage of my life I decided to learn something new. Actually I really want to invest some time in learning and do few programming subjects on the way. My current arsenal (programming language wise) is quite poor and outdated, therefore I want to expand it a little.
Not only I want to pick a new language(s) but also decided to move all development to a platform that I never really used before: NetBSD. There's no religion or even a technical reason behind it, just wanted a no-frills UNIX that I haven't played with yet. I have quite a bit of Linux and seldom FreeBSD experience, so I believe I'll survive there too.
The reason for me to write this blog is to document little findings mainly for myself (yeah I know, wiki page would have done a better job) and for those who can find them useful.