A posting today to the LiveJournal python_dev community wound up sort of askingwhy del has to be a Python builtin instead of a method. At first Ithought this had a nice simple answer, but the more I thought about itthe less obvious it became, and by the time I'd worked out a satisfyinganswer I'd had to really think about how Python fits together.

The short summary is that del needs to be a builtin because Python'sobject model is based on references and namespaces

I suppose it was inevitable, but the marketers have definitely arrived;the otherwise excellent In The Pipeline 'ssyndication feed now has banner ads. Animated banner ads atthat. I find this especially irritating because the feed is already a partial text feed , which means that I'm goingto visit the website anyways (because I have to). Adding animatedbanner ads on top is just adding insult to injury.

I honestly don't know why marketers still keep doing this. Everyonewith three brain cells to

I helped a coworker debug an interesting Linux problem today, and inthe process wound up reinforcing something that I already more or lessknew but hadn't really thought about for a while. Namely:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart doesn't unload and reloadthe kernel modules for your network devices.

A networking restart will bring down and then restart all of yourinterfaces, reset parameters and so on, but the one thing it doesn't reset is kernel modules. They