Yesterday's entry mentioned in passingfixing a bug in DWiki . Today's entry is about the anatomy of that bug(and how I found it).

This starts with DWiki 's processing model, which involves displayingpages in a number of different formats, which are called'views'. (More about this is in ProcessingModel .) Not allviews are valid for all pages (for example, the ' history 'view isn't valid for a file without a version history).

If an

There's a large debate about static versus dynamic typing in theprogramming and language communities. (There is a classic BruceEckel article on this here , for example.)

I spent part of today fixing some 'issues' in DWiki , which iswritten in Python. This gave me the opportunity to reflect about thesort of bugs I've been finding in it. Python is dynamically typed,and I don't have any sort of formal test system for DWiki . In theory,this should lead to

Here's some interesting bits and pieces for software developers:

• bstring , a C library for safeand easy string manipulation in the style of Python. Every sooften I need to mangle strings faster than Python or Perl canmanage it; at those times, I turn to the bstring library.(I have a longer writeup on bstring here .)

• quilt , a packagethat allows one to manage a series of patches by keeping track of thechanges each patch makes. Patches can be applied, un-applied,

A great deal of system administration consists of not stubbing your toea second time.

(Unfortunately I must mar this by adding 'on the same thing' as afootnote.)