upgrading from postgres 8.3 to 8.4

I upgraded my postgres today.  (Yes, I know it is an old version – that is what the CodeRanch forums use.)  First I reviewed what I did to install 8.3 originally and how frustrating that was.  Upgrading went smoother.  Here’s what I did:

  1. Download the Mac Postgres 8.4 graphical installer.
  2. Install it.
  3. Create my database and load data
  4. Change context.xml in Tomcat to point to port 5433.  (since I had two postgres installs at the same time, it incremented the port from the default of 5432) (changed this back)
  5. sudo su – root and changed  /Library/PostgreSQL/8.4/data/postgresql.conf to use port 5542.  (If I was doing this again, I’d just uninstall the old version as first step to avoid port conflicts)
  6. In finder: Go > Go to folder > Libraries > Postgres > 8.3 and select the uninstaller app

That’s it.  Nice and easy.  Which is good because the initial install was nothing but easy!

Now I can rewrite this without a stored procedure!

installing genymotion on a mac

Bill Gorder has suggested numerous times to use Genymotion instead of the emulator in the Android Development Tools because it is faster.  This week, I downloaded it.  I had to turn off the hardware acceleration in the ADT emulator SDK one as it caused instability on my Mac.  It’s time to try something new.

Downloading appears simple and is described here.  I already had a recent version of VirtualBox installed (I use it to run Linux, Windows 8 and Chromium.)  I created a device and then tried to launch it.  Which gave me the error “Unable to load VirtualBox engine.” It directs me to the FAQ which didn’t help.

Luckily, the answer was only a search away.  I ran

sudo /Library/StartupItems/VirtualBox/VirtualBox restart 

and all was well.  I didn’t even need to restart Genymotion.  The problem is I need to run this command every time I reboot (or add it to my startup)

I then installed the Eclipse plugin into my ADT install.  After setting the workspace preferences Genymotion item to /Applications/Genymotion.app.  (For more on the plugin, see the docs).  I was a little surprised that to run the plugin, you need two steps:

  1. Launch the genymotion device using the icon in the toolbar.  (this isn’t a big deal; I was just surprised since the ADT emulator did it automatically)
  2. Run as/debug as Android application.  If you have run configuration already, make sure it is set to “Launch on all compatible devices/AVDs” with the drop down set to “active devices and AVDs”.  This is how Eclipse knows to connect to the Genymotion emulator and not the other ones.

The interface is snappy which is nice.  I also like that it works with adb so I can push apps.

making it too easy to do something (a toshiba laptop) + windows 8 annoyances

I helped a non-technical friend set up her new Windows 8 laptop.  I encountered a bunch of expected problems as Windows 8 “changes everything.”  I wound up showing her some keyboard shortcuts as they were easier than fighting with Windows 8:

  1. Alt + tab: to switch amongst applications
  2. Windows M: to show desktop
  3. Windows C: to get sidebar (this one she actually showed me as the first step in the restarting sequence)

I also did some setup to make Windows 8 less – um – prevalent.  The biggest one was to boot to the desktop instead of the start mess and put the few commonly used programs on the desktop.  I used windows-r a lot to type “cmd” and get to the command line.

I was expecting Windows 8 to be annoying though so this didn’t surprise me.  What did surprise me was the touchpad.  I’m not sure if this is Microsoft’s fault or Toshiba’s.  The laptop trackpad was disabled by default.  I turned it on in the Windows settings.  Then I learned that if you hit F5, it disables it. (Which I did by accident when trying to do alt + f4).  It seems like it shouldn’t be so easy to disable the trackpad.  A confirmation would be nice.