One of the interesting issues of working at a university is thatit's amazingly hard to throw obsolete equipment away. Which, inits own way, illustrates how universities are peculiar places , since in a company you can at leasttheoretically get rid of things by throwing them in a dumpster.

Part of the problem is just that relatively scarce money causes peopleto reflexively cling to working (or theoretically working) equipmentlong past its best before date. Even when something's not working, whenyou are babying other

It turns out that there are some situations in Python where it is useful toknow what your superclass is. In particular, itwould be nice for mixin classes to be able to know when they are aboutto call methods on object() instead of on some actual user class.

It would be nice if the objects returned by super() directly exposed away of determining this. Unfortunately they do not, and they don't evendirectly expose what the next superclass is, although given a super object you

The yearly on-campus technical conference has just wrapped up for anotheryear, so it seems a good time to write down my rules of thumb forpicking what conference talks to go to, in the hopes that I'll rememberthem for next year. (This year, I only remembered them about halfwaythrough.)

First, I should note that this is about picking interesting talks, notrelevant ones. With rare exceptions, I don't go to talks at our localtechnical conference to be educated,