IBM Developerworks recently carried an article comparing the LILO and GRUB Linux bootloaders that wound up concludingthere was nothing LILO did better than GRUB.

I beg to disagree, and strongly. LILO has two important features forserver operation:

First, a one-shot mode, where LILO tries booting a particular kernelonly once ; after that, it goes back to its normal default. This isa reassuring way of trying new kernels that you are not entirely surewill work. If you set the kernel up to reboot on panics

One of the aphorisms of HCI design is that if users keep making the sameerror with a program, it's the program and not the users that's actuallywrong. By this standard, almost all version control systems really needan HCI makeover, because there is one classical mistake that users keepmaking over and over.

The mistake: make a change, then make an unrelated change, then make athird unrelated change (perhaps fix three different and independent bugsin entirely different files). You get a

I'm a little bit late to the Unicode in Python debate party; Ian Bicking and others were writingabout it back in early August, for example here and here .By now, lots of people around the Python blog community have weighedin on the high-level issues.My grumbles about Python's Unicode support are more low-level, likethe problem with Unicode in hashes that Ian Bicking found.

Specifically, I think that Python is too helpful with automaticconversions between Unicode strings and byte strings,