I'm not the first person to notice this, but the MSN search spider ('msnbot' if you want tosearch for it in the user agent portion of weblogs, or just look forrequests from the 207.46.98.* subnet) seems to have gone crazy.

Specifically, the MSNBot is repeatedly and aggressively crawlingcompletely unchanging URLs, while paying much less attention to changingones. On this server , the past 29 day's worth of logs show:

• the

The issue of identity on the Internet is a tricky one, and one of thethings that makes it so confusing is that people often want them to dotwo different things:

1. prove who someone is: the web site really is EBay's.
2. prove who someone isn't: that email isn't from a well-known spammer.

This is confusing because the issue mostly doesn't came up in the realworld, where physical identities are generally one to aperson. Checking drivers' licenses at the

A recent ONLamp article on the Python debugger included the line:

The only time we reach for a debugger is when something goes wrongor breaks and our standard debugging techniques such as print statements (or better yet, log messages) do not reveal the root ofthe problem.

This sparked an insight about why print -based debugging is so popular.(It is; a surprising number of people swear by it, and get good results.The quote got my attention because it made me go 'yeah, the author