For my sins, I am one of those people who doesn't always read Python'sfine documentation carefully enough. For example, I wrote a large chunkof code using the helpful os.path.join() before I noticed a littlegotcha: it's very helpful. In particular:

Joins one or more path components intelligently. If any component isan absolute path, all previous components are thrown away, andjoining continues .

(Right there in black and white in the fine documentation .)

There's three ways to build RPMs: the silly way, the easy way, andthe better way.

The silly way starts with /bin/su root , which should be enough of a warning sign. You really don't wantto be building and installing packages as root unless you don't have achoice, and you do.

The easy way is:

$ cat >$HOME/.rpmmacros
%_topdir /some/where
^D
$ cd /some/where
$ mkdir BUILD

One of the things they tell you in programming school is 'side effectsare bad; you should avoid them if possible'. Apparently every now andthen I need a reminder of this, because side effects were at the bottomof my feed whoops from last night.

One of the most expensive bits of DWiki is converting pages from DWikiText into HTML. Originally the conversion was simple andstraightforward; stick wikitext in, get HTML out. But as DWiki grew morefeatures, the wikitext started having additional information: whetherpeople