As I've said before, Microsoft Windows Vista is a terrible disaster which I hope I never have to deal with in any capacity, professional or otherwise.  I suspect that it is inevitable, but I will resist it for as long as possible.

The FSF has a campaign, "BADVISTA", to educate end-users about the ways in which Vista is limiting your freedom more ( Read more... )

The word "depreciate" means "to lessen the price or value of".  This is an accounting jargon term referring to the process by which assets lose value over time.  It is pronounced 'Dee Pree Shee Ate".

The word "deprecate" means "to express disapproval of" or "to urge reasons against; protest against".  This is a programming jargon term describing ( Read more... )

It occurs to me that there may still be a few Python people who read this blog but have not yet discovered JP Calderone's.

If you are such a person, he just did an excellent write-up of the practical implications of Python's rich comparison operators.  Check it out.

Have you ever written a module that looked like this?
subscribers = []

def addSubscriber(subscriber):
    subscribers.append(subscriber)

def publish(message):
    for subscriber in subscribers:
        subscriber.notify(message)

And then used it like this?
from publisher import publish

class worker:
    def work(self):
        publish(self)

I've ( Read more... )

Often it is the means that justify the ends: Goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.

- Alan Perlis, Epigram 64, "Epigrams in Programming"

How does a computer programmer get better at computer programming ( Read more... )

Or, 72/72 to be precise.

Twisted is once again in danger of losing the engineship of your Internet!  If you haven't voted on this Jyte claim already, please do so now!

Unfortunately, if you have questions about how to write and run tests using Twisted's "trial" tool, this work in progress is still the best answer I can give you.  It's a good work in progress, but it's definitely not finished.

If you need some documentation, please feel free to provide feedback and patches at Twisted's ticket number 2443I am ( Read more... )

If you have some public SSH keys, you should really upload them to LaunchpadThis is one of the lesser-known but extremely useful features of Launchpad.  When I'm adding accounts for people to one of my many, various machines, I always have to figure out a secure channel to upload/download keys or deal with the temporary exposure of a plaintext ( Read more... )

One of the first inklings the world had of the upcoming release of the game "Halo" was a cryptic website showing various obscure quotations which appeared to be from some ancient religious text.  Pre-acquisition, I always loved their sense of style; I am a huge fan of the Marathon series.  My favorite quote from the collection, which stuck with me ( Read more... )

This week, some people are saying some nice things about Twisted.
"A big component to that has been our use of Twisted Python. We're pretty reliant on the Twisted framework, and we use it for our base-line management software that we use to run the great majority of production services that we have, our monitoring infrastructure and the next- ( Read more... )