I'm a little bit late to the Unicode in Python debate party; Ian Bicking and others were writingabout it back in early August, for example here and here .By now, lots of people around the Python blog community have weighedin on the high-level issues.My grumbles about Python's Unicode support are more low-level, likethe problem with Unicode in hashes that Ian Bicking found.

Specifically, I think that Python is too helpful with automaticconversions between Unicode strings and byte strings,

The overall SMTP connection rate is up from last week , as we hit 213,000 SMTPconnections from at least 36,000 different IP addresses.The SMTP frontend hit a new highwater of 22 simultaneous connectionsbeing checked at once. It's possible that a lot of this is from spammersforging our domains as the MAIL FROM of their spams.

Top 10 kernel level SMTP rejections:

Host/Mask           Packets   Bytes213.4.149.1

I spent today wrestling various pieces of commercial software into ourFedora Core 4 auto-install environment. In theory this should havebeen fast and dirt simple, because all of the vendors had thingspacked up in RPMs.

In practice, most vendors produce RPMs that are glowing examples ofhow not to package your software in RPM form. Instead of creating RPMsthat are fully installed software, they generally create RPMs that arelittle more than lightly packaged up files and then add huge amountsof post-install scripts to shuffle everything