Here's some things on printing standard format Unix errors in Python programs specifically,based on things that I've both seen and done myself.

First, I tend to wind up putting standard warn() and die() functions into my programs, but they only handle very low level details(putting the program name in and flushing things as necessary ). Beyond that:

• you should always catch EnvironmentError instead of anything morespecific. Functions are inconsistent about whether they raise IOError or OSError , so you shouldn'

So one recent tidbit of news from Slashdot is that people are shocked, utterly shocked that some bad people are using EC2 to host machines thatdo bad stuff and that Amazon is surprisingly ineffective about stoppingthis.

Well, yes. Hello, here is a newsflash: cheap or free hosting (it's freeif you use other people's credit card numbers) attracts bad people likeflies to honey, and people operating cheap services rarely (by whichI mean 'never') staff up their abuse department