Recently a co-worker pointed out that the downside to giving machines distinctive hostnames is that users become attachedto them, and when you introduce newer, better machines the users don'tmigrate to them. Once I thought about it, this made sense; after all,by naming things we make them distinct, and thus no longer quite sogeneric and equivalent.

(At this point I am tempted to think thoughts about brand loyaltyand the distinctiveness of brand logos.)

One contributing factor is that with many generic

Crudely summarized, method resolution order is how Python decides whereto look for a method (or any other attribute) on a class that inheritsfrom several classes. Python actually has two; a simple one for oldstyle classes and a rather complicated one for new style classes.

(Technically, method resolution order applies even for singleinheritance classes, it's just that they have a very boring one.)

With the old style class:

class Foo(A, B, C):    pass

Python will look up

In Python, when you have a class that inherits from both a primary classand some mixin classes (for example, if you're using the SocketServerstuff ),it's conventional to declare your class's inheritance list with theprimary class first:

class Real(primary, mixin1, mixin2):    ....

However, an important safety tip: if your mixin class overrides methodsof the primary class, it has to be first . Failure to observe thissafety tip can cause head

If you can't find anything wrong, you haven't looked carefully enough.

The immediate corollary is also important:

If you can't find anything, the intruders are still there.

The leading cause for not finding anything wrong on a machine youknow is compromised is that you haven't detected the rootkit thatis hiding things from you.