One of the nice things about writing a blog is getting to say 'oh, oops,I was a dumbass, let me fix that'. Today I have to own up to a bigexample of this.

Back at the start of WanderingThoughts , I wrote an entry where I complained in part:

In theory the absolute URL should include the port (unless it's thedefault). In practice, every program I've tried gleefully adds theport itself if it is a non-standard port and

I am afraid that I am too busy listening to the Men WithoutHats to writetoo much tonight, so I am just going to trot out some of myirritations with Python's socket module . Allof these are on Unix machines.

(I suspect that portability to Windows is the reason for some of these,but it doesn't mean that I'm not irritated by them.)

• socket.error . Let me count the ways:

  • most instances should actually be IOError or OSError instead.
  • it has

Part of the just finished intra-university IT conference here was avendor tradeshow. The vendors were there to market to us, but thereal purpose of going to tradeshows is of course the loot; the vendorgiveaways. (And if you're hungry, the candy and snacks the vendors leaveout as lures.)

In the hopes of helping vendors at future tradeshows, I thought Iwould share some opinions on these giveaways.

• most overused giveaway: pens. If you must give these out, pleasemake sure

These days I get very little spam, and what I do get is almost allphish email, stock touting, and advance fee fraud. Partly I'm lucky,but partly I've spent quite a lot of time working on our spam filters.

A lot of spam has relatively distinct characteristics that make it easyto filter. For example, there's a limit to how obfuscated spammers canmake URLs and still have people visit their websites, and there's onlyso many places that will host spammer