One of Unix's small problems is that it has no simple and universal wayto refer to people's home directories, especially other people's homedirectories. Some people are about to pipe up about ~user , but that'snot a universal way; support for it has to be added to every programthat will use it (and in every context where they resolve file names),and inevitably there are programs where it is not supported at all or isnot supported everywhere. Beyond that,

Here is something that I ran into the other day :the socket module 's htonl() and ntohl() functions will return signed numbers undersome circumstances, not unsigned ones, which means that for some inputvalues they will return negative numbers.

(Some quick testing suggests that this happens on 32-bit x86 machinesbut not 64-bit x86 Linux machines; all of the 32-bit machines I haveaccess to are running some version of Python 2.5.

One of the corollaries to the limits of certain sorts of anti-spamheuristics is that if you see spam softwareactively working to get around any particular sort of precaution, youcan assume that the particular precaution is getting reasonably popular.

This follows from spammers being lazy but not stupid; if the precautionwas not reasonably popular, dealing with it probably wouldn't be worththe time of the programmers behind the spam bots. That they do deal withit implies that it is worth their while to do so, which