In particular, universities have a computing environment that is morepeculiar than I think a lot of people realize (sometimes even peopleinside universities, because from some angles it is very easy tomiss). I wrote about one example of this (and the practical effects ithas) back in UniversityFirewalls .

One of the ways that they are peculiar, a way that I think is at thecore of a lot of things, is this:

In most parts of most companies, communicating with the rest of thecompany is

This week we received 12,270 email messages from 159 different IPaddresses. Our SMTP server handled 31,972 sessions from 2,643different IP addresses. Session volume is down from last week , which is a relief, although it'snot back down to the historical levels yet.

However, connection volume has not dropped substantially from last week : 260,000 connections from at least 53,760 different IPaddresses,

I've mentioned before that in Python, def is actually an executablestatement (in FunctionDefinitionOrder ). A logical consequences of thisis that default values for function arguments are evaluated only once,when the def runs.

I say this because expressions generally get evaluated when any Python statement runs, so the expressions in things like ' deffoobar(a, b=greeble(c), d=None): ' are not being an exception. Theexception would be if they were not evaluated then and were instead