One of the more subtle advantages of full hardware virtualization isthat your virtualized hardware always stays the same, no matter whatactual hardware you happen to be running on. This is a real advantagefor license servers, which are often nodelocked with various crazyschemes that assume you are trying to cheat on them if you changehardware.

(Sure, the company might fix the problem for us. If they're still inbusiness, still interested in our business, still having anything to dowith that ancient version of the

From Robert Brewer comes You are what you code ,which has given me something to think about. I'll quote the opening:

Hey, you. Do you realize what you're writing? The long-standing ITjoke is that you always end up coding your own job out of existence.But what are you coding yourself into ?

(From Planet Python , where his blog isaggregated.)

Update: I apologize to my readers for putting a link here that doesn'twork without an extra,

Following up on my earlier thoughts about print based debugging , here's an easy debugger feature that wouldmake my life much better (and make me more inclined to actually usedebuggers):

Provide a way to record things that doesn't show them to me until Iask for them.

I'm not actually interested in reading the things that I print out, notright away; I'm just collecting the information so that I can look backin time at the program's state once the bug

There's a problem with functions that make functions: they obscureinformation in exception stack backtraces, because all of the createdfunctions have the same name. If you have a lot of auto-createdfunctions, just which one is blowing up and how do you tell them apart?

(I noted a similar effect with lambdas back here .)

A function's name is part of its func_code attribute, specifically func_code.co_name . Unfortunately this attribute is read-only, so you

As sort of a successor of a previous entry , here isa thesis:

Increasingly, people use Microsoft Windows not because they want tobut because they have to.

(There's various reasons they have to: they're forced to by theiremployer, they need to use programs that only run on Windows, such asIE or Microsoft Office or various computer games, or even because thealternative costs too much.)

This is a problem for Microsoft, because customers that are only usingyou because they don

Partly because I couldn't easily turn up any good pictures ofthem on the Internet, here's a picture of an Ethernet splitter in its natural habitat:

(Full sized version here .)

The grey thing with the scratches in the background is the side of myoffice bookcase. Since this is a university, it is a dun metal one,hence the shade. (It may technically be some species of green. At acertain level of dull colouration, it becomes hard to tell.)

You will