I've known for a while that the Python interpreter has a few littleinternal limits and implementation quirks . I canaccept that; limits on the sizes of internal objects are not unexpected,and you have to draw the line somewhere.

But I was surprised to discover that the Python interpreter has a limiton how many arguments you can write in a function call; 255, as ithappens.

(The limitation is on explicit arguments in the source code; you cancall functions with many more arguments if

The Planet Lab consortium is, toquote its banner, 'an open platform for developing, deploying, andaccessing planetary-scale services'. Courtesy of a friend noticing , today'splanetary-scale service appears to be repeatedly requesting robots.txt from people's webservers.

Here, they've made 523 requests (so far) from 323 different IPaddresses (PlanetLab nodes are hosted around the Internet, mostly atuniversities; they usually have 'planetlab' or 'pl' or

Engineering Management Hacks: The BigBook Technique is an amusing story of how a group of engineers got their managementto pay attention to Brooks's Law ("Adding manpower to a late softwareproject makes it later"). I won't spoil the punchline; read it yourself.

Around here we don't have problems with Brooks's Law, perhaps becausewe don't have the extra manpower to add to late projects to start with.

(From Daring Fireball .)

Your button for 'mark all items as read' should not be rightnext to the button for 'advance to next unread item'. Liferea , I'm looking at you .

(Fortunately it was not a feed with a lot of unread or updateditems. I think.)