Dan Kusnetzky from ZDNet has posted this morning about Racemi and our product, DynaCenter. DynaCenter repurposes servers on-the-fly from the iron up, making it easy to turn your disaster recovery assets into extra computing resources. When the production data center goes offline, the DR site can be brought online in little more than the amount of time it takes to reboot the servers. Similarly, in a test/development lab setup you can use DynaCenter to test an application under several operating systems on the same hardware, without manually swapping drives or re-installing anything.

Over at The B-List: Instant web sites, James Bennett has a nice description of the databrowse add-on for django, complete with screenshots. I’d never heard of the tool before, but it sounds extremely useful, and since I’m planning a new django-based site soon I’ll definitely give it a try.

I’ve used easy_install for open source tools, but I have to admit I never thought of setting up a web server as a private repository for closed source apps. Jeremy makes it look simple.

I need a book to teach someone about basic database design. They don’t need relational algebra or calculus, and they don’t have to be an expert about highly optimized storage, indexing, or anything like that. They just need some basic normalization, column type selection, and query help for what should be a pretty simple database. They took a college class on RDBMSes, but the class and accompanying book were both terrible.

Version 0.3 of LinkingToMe remembers the link history and highlights new links since the previous run in bold.

The latest book I’ve been reading as part of the Atlanta Python Users’s Group Book Club is Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran. Disclosure: My copy of the book was provided free, as part of O’Reilly Media’s support for the book club. My Impressions I have to admit, I was a little concerned when I picked up Programming Collective Intelligence that my rusty math skills would be a hindrance to really understanding the material.

The pprint module includes a “pretty printer” for producing aesthetically pleasing representations of your data structures. Read more at pymotw.com: pprint

The shutil module includes high-level file operations such as copying, setting permissions, etc. Read more at pymotw.com: shutil

Google’s Webmaster Tools site provides a reporting feature to let you see who is linking to you. Unfortunately, the report is backwards from the orientation I want to read it. It lists the remote links for each of your local pages. I want to see all of the local pages linked on a remote site grouped together. That helps me recognize trends and identify people who might be blogging about what I write here.

For those of you subscribe directly to the PyMOTW feed, I apologize for the temporary interruption in service. Apparently I reached a maximum feed size and FeedBurner cut me off. I didn’t realize there was an issue, because I had given up on the FeedBulletin notifications, since they just cried wolf every day first by saying that there was a delay in updating and then in the same email reporting that everything was working again.