On Bots is a fascinating reporton a large scale experiment to see how web search bots would explorean almost limitless set of linked pages. Whether or not the resultsgeneralize (or are still applicable), it's got a bunch of prettypictures.

(From Tim Bray ,rather belatedly.)

I have a small defect in the Python code I produce: I rarely botherto make my classes printable or to give them a repr(). Most of theclasses will never be printed, and the default repr value is goodenough to distinguish two instances from each other.

But this is a mistake, nicely illustrated by my grump about assert'sweakness as a debugging tool . Objects having a usefulstring value makes it much easier to dump out information about thestate of things when a problem comes up.

A fundamental problem with CR is that it implicitly assumes that yourcorrespondent wants you to read their email more than you do. Just lookat who's doing the work: your correspondents are doing work so that youdon't have to.

(Of course, observe that the people for whom this is the most true are the spammers.)

When this is not true, when you want to read the mail more than thesender wants you to, is exactly where CR systems break down. You mightthink

Pumas on Hoverbikes is aboutmanaging system administrators, and it's funny. Here's a somewhatout of context quote:

This is because managers are usually people who proved that they werehandy with a chaingun and were thus rewarded by having their thumbscut off and their weapons handed to some punk college hire.

From this you should be able to figure out if you want toread the rest. There's other articles too, like Suck Factor , which is where I first droppedinto the site.

(

Recently, Pete Zaitcev wrote in passing :

Now if only someone designed a UTF-8 locale which did not screwthe ordering files in ls output...

What he said. I've come to realize that what I want what I'll call the' C.UTF-8 ' locale: all of the old-fashioned Unix non-locale behavior,but with non-ASCII characters encoded in UTF-8. I don't mind UTF-8 toomuch and it's clearly the

Presented without comment, the 18 spaces of Unicode .

(From Sam Ruby .)

I started with a simple question that was vaguely orbiting in the backof my mind: are HTML numeric character entities always in Unicode,regardless of the character set of the HTML web page? The answer isyes, and that I was asking a misleading question.

Despite being called 'charset' in HTTP headers and META declarations,what you are declaring is actually the web page's character encoding,not its character set. HTML is specified as always being in the Unicodecharacter set, although the encoding of characters

Derived from here :

import sysx = 10del sys.modules['__main__']print x

If you execute this at the interpreter prompt, you get a NameErrorthat x is not defined. If you execute it as a file (or if you putthe sys.modules and print bit in a function and run the function),you get None printed.

The interpreter situation makes a certain amount of sense, once youdiscover that the interpreter is holding no references to anythingfrom

This week, we:

• got 15,265 messages from 278 different IP addresses.
• handled 21,071 sessions from 1,538 different IP addresses.
• received 215,602 connections from at least 52,130 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 12 connections being checked at once.

These statistics superficially look a lot like last week 's, although up somewhat. What they hide isa significant spam storm that has actually