My lord, that took a while, but an exchange rate service is provided by Bermilabs. All you do is call http://webservices.bermilabs.com/exchange/to/base where "to" is the "destination" currency and "base is the one you are starting in. For example:

curl http://webservices.bermilabs.com/exchange/nzd/usd
1.3364

EDIT: Where "works" means "give or take 25%". Damn.

Not that I want to get involved in the murky world of database benchmarking, OK? But just as a datapoint I have a (django) unit test suite and I just ran it against an entirely default install of the current MySQL and an also entirely default and somewhat elderly install of Postgres (8.3.7). The MySQL run takes three minutes. Postgres, 21 seconds.

Now this might be because Django's ORM is in some way tuned towards Postgres - correct use of transactions and what have you - but even so.

There is no excuse for using MySQL any more. Postgres is vastly better and the half lifetime I just lost doing this is proof evident of the fact but, right now, some nutbar psycho wants me to deploy onto MySQL and consequently I have to port some stuff to it (because My's date objects have no concept of time zone and so my existing code borks) and this means I need to set up a development environment for it because shoving hot pokers into my eyes was apparently not an option.

Let's say you've installed MySQL from Oracle's official disk image installer. You need to add the installed location to your $PATH manually. I just put this in my ~/.profile

export PATH=/usr/local/mysql-5.1.50-osx10.6-x86/bin/:$PATH

Now you will be able to download and build the MySQL python driver thingy with a traditional "sudo python.py setup.py install". Will further edit this post if it doesn't actually work.

Don't use MySQL.

I've said this privately before but it just occurred to me to make a blog posting so I can say "told you so" when it finally happens.

We are going to be seeing 16 core ARM based Macs sooner rather than later.

Think about it. They (Apple) have moved entire processor architectures twice on the mac (68k->ppc->i386); have already ported the majority of OSX to ARM; have bought an ARM based design company and are making their own chips; both OSX 10.6 and iOS4 are all obsessive about parallel execution of tasks and now ARM will be making (or, rather, licensing) a 16 core design.

It's gonna happen.

It appears Apple have finally relented on the dreadful section 3.3.1 decision. Noteworthy changes are:

• You can now use whatever tool you want to write apps.


• Apps can include interpreters provided they don't download additional code.


• The analytics section has been rewritten to basically un-block other ad networks.

There are also stated guidelines on app store inclusion (or otherwise) policies. As usual, John Gruber has done a great job of summarising these.

They sent the password back in plain text. It's 2010, what's wrong with these people?

Omnigroup provide constantly updated stats on running OSX version numbers from their update server.

tl;dr 10.6 is 55% odd, 10.5+10.6 together is 75%, 10.4 is still 25% of the market. I have version number logging in my update server now, I should probably get round to actually peeling the numbers to bits.