1. Real Steel – Watched on 4th Jan 2012

2. How To Train Your Dragon – Watched on 5th Jan 2012

3. What’s Your Number? – Watched on 7th Jan 2012

4. Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl – Watched on 8th Jan 2012

5. Saving Private Ryan – Watched on 9th Jan 2012

6. The Dirty Picture – Watched on 23rd Jan 2012

This post will be updated with the list of movies as I watch them

More books to be added later and this list would be updated as I read these books.

50-50 challenge is the challenge to read 50 books and watch 50 movies in 2012.

More information about 50-50 challenge: http://www.fiftyfifty.me/

Some useful book lists for anyone looking for books to read:

1. http://bluepyramid.org/library/bookcomp.htm

2. http://www.the-bookman.com/main/Best.books.html

3. http://www.marcandangel.com/2009/08/24/40-modern-nonfiction-books-everyone-should-read/

My first list of 15 books:

1. The Emperor’s Handbook: A New Translation of The Meditations – Marcus Aurelius

2. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

3. The 50th Law – 50 Cent and Robert Greene

4. 1984 – George Orwell

5. Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul – John Eldredge

6. Outliers: The Story of Success – Malcolm Gladwell

7. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

8. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference – Malcolm Gladwell

9. Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson

10. The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition : A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth – M. Scott Peck

11. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

12. 11/22/63 – Stephen King

13. King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine – Robert Moore & Douglas Gillette

14. Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth – T. Harv Eker

15. How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships – Leil Lowndes

More info about the challenge here: http://www.fiftyfifty.me/

This is list of 25 movies already released. More movies would be added as part of 2nd list including the movies released in 2012.

This post will be updated as I watch the movies.

Movie List from IMDB Top 250

1. Schindler’s List (1993)

2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

3. City of God (2002)

4. Forrest Gump (1993)

5. Leon: The Professional (1994)

6. Citizen Kane (1941)

7. Toy Story 3 (2010)

8. Saving Private Ryan (1998) –> Watched on 9th Jan 2012

9. Requiem for a Dream (2000)

10. Reservoir Dogs (1992)

11. Up (2009)

12. Gran Torino (2008)

13. Scarface (1983)

14. Donnie Darko (2001)

15. Gone with the Wind (1939)

16. There Will Be Blood (2007)

17. How to Train Your Dragon (2010) –> Watched on 5th Jan 2012

18. Magnolia (1999)

19. The Godfather: Part II (1974)

20. The Godfather:  Part III (1990)

21. Casablanca (1942)

Other Movies

1. Winter’s Bone (2010)

2. Blow (2001)

3. Garden State (2004)

4. Toy Story 2 (1999)

First book list coming soon followed by 2nd lists for movies and books.

The default version of Python which came with the system was 2.5.1 while I wanted to install latest version 2.6.4 (as of now) since there are some things which wont work with the older version.

Since there are lots of system related things on Mac which make use of default version of Python, so its not advisable to remove/mess with that version. However, different versions of python can be installed along with the default version which is what I did.

Some quick notes:

The default python is installed here:

/Library/Python/

Then I grabbed the latest version of MacPython from the official python website:

http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.6.4/python-2.6.4_macosx10.3.dmg

If you follow the standard install process here, then this will install the latest version of Python here (please confirm this as I am not exactly sure but it worked for me):

/usr/local/bin

so it wont interfere with the default version and the necessary config files are found in this directory:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions

Now, when I typed “python” in a terminal, it automatically brought up the new version although I didn’t make any changes to the path variable (there might be a need for that so please check online if this does not work for you).

So now the default version of the python for system usage is still there and when I type up Python in a terminal, it brings  me the latest version, which is exactly what I want:

Python 2.6.4 (r264:75821M, Oct 27 2009, 19:48:32)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5493)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

Now, I use Python through, interactive shell called iPython which is very useful:

http://ipython.scipy.org/moin/

However, when I typed iPython in a terminal , it was still showing me the older version of iPython corresponding to Python 2.5.1 (the default version).

This is because I had installed iPython using easy_install tool for default Python version here:

/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages

(Easy install is also located there, not sure about how exactly that install process worked but the easy_install site should be helpful):

http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall

So, now I needed to uninstall, the older version of iPython and install the new one.

To install the older version, I went to the site-packages directory and typed:

sudo easy_install -mxN ipython

it will ask you for the root password.

And then install the latest version of iPython:

cd ~/Downloads/

wget http://ipython.scipy.org/dist/0.10/ipython-0.10.tar.gz

tar -xvf ipython-0.10.tar.gz

cd ipython-0.10

python -c "import sys;print sys.prefix"

The last command, should display:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6

which is the path to the latest version of Python which we just installed and we want the iPython version of Python to correspond to this version as well.

So, now you are into the ipython directory, from where the iPython will be installed:

python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install

This should install latest version of iPython corresponding to the latest version of Python.

So now when you type ipython in a terminal, it should give:

Python 2.6.4 (r264:75821M, Oct 27 2009, 19:48:32)
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

IPython 0.10 -- An enhanced Interactive Python.
?         -> Introduction and overview of IPython's features.
%quickref -> Quick reference.
help      -> Python's own help system.
object?   -> Details about 'object'. ?object also works, ?? prints more.

In [1]:

which is what we want. Mission Accomplished!!!

I wanted to do this for a long time but could not find a suitable guide so I found this from isolated sources with a bit of trial and error.

Hope this helps someone having the same issue as me.

Feel free to post your comments about it.

Note: this whole process should be even simpler for someone trying to install Python/iPython from scratch. You just need to figure out the easy_install part which should be easy

Check this link: http://zenhabits.net/2009/08/the-minimalist-principle-omit-needless-things/
This is sort of motivation behind this post of mine. Looking forward to more of it.

May be I can go back and sleep peacefully now.

I searched online for making the upgrades and after a long search, I came across links on the web which helped me perform the upgrades. So, I decided to write a detailed post about my upgrade process so it could be helpful to others.

The packet management tool which I’m using is yum. So its a good idea to know few basic yum commands:

yum list available

yum list installed

yum list updates

yum install [package]

yum remove [package]

I guess all of above commands are self explanatory.
Since the repositories which are used by RHEL are not up to date, so we need to use and setup some other repository. One of the most popular and the one which I used is Remi’s repository which has latest packages for most of the software:

http://rpms.famillecollet.com/index.html

This repository is not there in the repository directory

/etc/yum.repos.d

yet so we need to enable it in order to use it. To do that we need to download some additional RPMs and install them first. The 2 RPMs which we need are:
epel-release and remi-release
My architecture is i386 so if yours is x86_64 then get the RPMs for it accordingly.

We can get the first one from here:
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

using:

wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

rpm -Uvh epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

Download the 2nd one from Remi’s site:
http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm

using:

wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm

rpm -Uvh remi-release-5.rpm

2nd package is dependent on first one so we need to install 1st before the 2nd.

Now, I removed the older packages first (not sure if this was needed though) by using:

yum list installed

and looking for those packages which started with php or mysql. That also included php packages dependent on mysql and vice-versa. Remove them using:

yum remove [package]

IMPORTANT: I didn’t mention it here but if you have any data present (especially MySQL database) then please make sure that you back them up  first before removing packages as that may result in loss of data also. I didn’t have any data when I started so I didn’t mention it before.

The steps will now create corresponding information for Remi’s repository in:

/etc/yum.repos.d/

So, now we have the older packages removed and need to install the new ones. Before that we need to enable Remi’s repository. For that goto file called remi.repo in the repo directory and under the section [remi] there, change enabled = 0 to enabled = 1.

After doing this, run the following command:

yum install php

Now, run:

php -v

and you should get something like this:

PHP 5.2.9 (cli) (built: Feb 27 2009 14:42:58)
Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2009 Zend Technologies


as the output.

Now, run the following commands:

yum install mysql-server
yum install php-mysql

yum install mysql-devel

and it should install MySQL server and PHP-MySQL module along with necessary dependencies.
Now, you can check your working of PHP and MySQL server by starting httpd and mysql services and may be writing a phpinfo() file:

/sbin/service httpd start
/sbin/service mysqld start

So the PHP and MySQL should be working now. I have not yet done any configuration of any of those and its likely that I’ll run into some problems there and so may be I’ll make another post about it.
Some of the links which were useful to me and from where I used information for the installation process:

https://forums.misdivision.com/showthread.php?t=1285
http://timt881.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/installing-phpmyadmin-and-php-52-on-a-centos-52-server/
http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=86086

Since this thing worked for me for RHEL 5.3 so I believe it should work for CentOS as well.