Python may be object oriented but it is also very flexible, so flexiblethat you can use its objects for all sorts of different things, many ofthem not very object-oriented by conventional definitions. I am not atraditional OO programmer, so I tend to use objects in Python in mostlynon-traditional ways and for a number of different purposes.

(By 'objects' here I mean roughly 'classes and instances of classes'.)

This list is not complete, but it covers all of the uses

I've always used relatively small fonts in my desktop environment, asseen in MyDesktopTour (although they aren't as small asthe fonts some people I know use). This wasn't particularly because Iliked small fonts; it's more because those were the font sizes I neededto use in order to fit two side by side 80-column xterm windows intoa 1280x1024 display. I used them for years and generally didn't thinkabout it

Over and over again, fields of work have followed a common trajectory(both inside and outside of computers). At first, everything is new andunknown, and the field is pioneered by people who have to be innovatorsand often deeply technical. There are no known tools and procedures, sothey need to be developed from scratch; generally everything has to behand-crafted and unique and you spend a lot of time building all of thisyourself.

But that's just the beginning. Over time this pioneering

In light of my entry on wikitext transitions , you might ask how you tell when youhave a parser instead of a rewriting engine. What is the line? It's notas simple as using or not using regular expressions; there are severalwikitext parsers that are strongly regular expression based, some ofthem quite cleverly.

As it happens, I think there is a simple, easy to make distinction: a parser has separate input and output text spaces , at least on aconceptual basis, while a rewriter only

Ever since it's become popular to add various sorts of advancedpermissions schemes to Unixes (ACLs, for example), it's struck me thatpart of the genius of Unix permissions is that they are short.

I don't particularly mean short in storage terms (although that didn'thurt Unix in the early days). I mean short more in the sense of'simple'; Unix permissions are simple enough that they have a short,clear representation. You can describe the basic access permissions

In this Sysadvent paen to configuration management I read the following little bit:

[...] In using a config management system, you are implicitlydocumenting the system's "desired state" - Why is the systemconfigured this way? [...]

No you aren't. If you use very well named configuration managementclasses and variables and so on, you may have at best started todocument the why of your configuration. Otherwise, configurationmanagement documents the how of your configuration but it can

Suppose that you have a wiki and for some reason you really need tochange the wikitext dialect that it accepts ( sadly this is not alwayshypothetical ). As I once alludedto in a parenthetical aside , there is a rightway to do this, one that will not make people swear off your software.As part of this you can make a small change to your wiki engine thatwill make all sorts of transitions much easier and thus make peoplehappier with your markup language.

To put it simply, the wrong

Back in commentary on my entry on ZFS features that could entice usto upgrade Solaris versions I mentioned that wewere in an unusual situation where ZFS log devices didn't seem likelyto help us enough to be worth the various costs, but that explainingit properly would require an actual entry. Well, you can guess whatthis finally is.

The primary purpose of ZFS log devices (hereafter 'slogs') is toaccelerate synchronous writes, such as the writes that need to be donewhen an application calls fsync

It's not really a secret that I love doing test installs of machinesand software in virtualized machines instead of on physical ones. It'sgenerally a lot faster, it's certainly a lot more convenient to do thiswork from my quiet desk instead of in a noisy lab area or machine room,and I can often snapshot images and roll back to snapshots in order toskip doing tedious rote stages over and over again. However, everyso often I run into something that doesn't work in