Python's urllib module convenientlyhandles a great many bits of fetching URLs for you, including HTTP basicauthentication. Unfortunately it does this by pausing everything to 'askthe user for the required information on the controlling terminal' (tomore or less quote from the documentation). This is generally not themost useful behavior in the world, and can even be rather disconcerting.

(A more sensible default behavior would have been to either raise anexception or return a HTTP 'authentication required' status.)

As a

When I started with x86_64 Fedora Core, I still built a few thingsas 32-bit applications on an otherwise 64-bit system; a 32-bit Firefoxto use Adobe's 32-bit only Flash plugins, and a 32-bit mplayer so itcould use Windows codecs to play various content. This has caused a certain amount of heartburn .

Recently, I decided to experiment with 64-bit versions of both (partlybecause doing the 3

Vernon Schyrver in news.admin.net-abuse.email:

The trouble with all "Good Guys" lists is in who pays. Maintaining acomprehensive list that can be widely used is expensive. [...]

Sooner instead of later, those who have financial reasons for seeingthemselves certified as good assume the financial burdens and soare given control. Organizations whose mail is never blocked can'tfind a reason to pay third parties for testamonials. They tell theircorrespodents "If you want my mail,

From a comment here :

I would suggest that you rip [your CDs], though.

I have no interest in ripping my CDs for a number of reasons:

• I listen to whole albums at a time, cycling through my collectionin an essentially fixed order. This means that at any given time I'monly really interested in the next few CDs and having everything sittingon disk is of no particular benefit.

  (Cycling through my collection this way avoids the twin perils ofburning out on albums that I really

Which Are More Legible: Serif or Sans Serif Typefaces? by Alex Pooleis a review and summary of a whole pile of writing about this. I'll cutto the conclusion (don't worry, it's not a spoiler since Alex Poole putsit in the first paragraph of the introduction):

To date, no one has managed to provide a conclusive answer to thisissue.

Alas, none of this helps me configure liferea to improve its legibility on a 17" CRT monitor. (I

This week, we:

• got 13,435 messages from 269 different IP addresses.
• handled 21,900 sessions from 1,620 different IP addresses.
• received 197,361 connections from at least 50,069 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 8 connections being checked at once.

This is down from last week , althoughthe connection numbers are still up a bit compared to two weeksago .