Blue Sky On Mars

I’m certain that this will be the most interesting thing I read today: Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain

I just canceled my dedicated server at GoDaddy, because they were stuck at Fedora Core 2, which makes any package upgrades and new installations a pain. Even though I canceled the hosting service, I’ve just got to say that they have excellent customer support. I’ve called them a few times over the past few months, and they’ve responded quickly and courteously, never gave me any kind of hassle when I wanted a refund for something, and have just been generally knowledgeable and ready to handle my requests. They even allow you to wait on hold silently rather than having to listen to some musical dreck. Especially given the prices they charge for their services, I think they do a very impressive job with customer support.

One of Amir’s CherryPy apps got digged yesterday, and he was kind enough to put together some tips for configuring Apache and CherryPy to handle a Digg effect.

If you’re going to be near Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil next week, you can hear Humberto Diógenes speak about TurboGears at 7º Fórum Internacional Software Livre.

How To Be A Successful Evil Overlord

These Stupid (Windows) Command Prompt Tricks actually look rather useful.

A friend of mine (hi, Dave!) is riding in the Wish-A-Mile 300 Bicycle Tour for the Make-A-Wish Foundation which tries to grant wishes to children with life-threatening disesases. The “300″ is the number of miles he’s got to ride in three days. In years past, Dave and I have done bike tours together, but those tours maxed out at about 65 miles in a day. 100 miles three days in a row is a lot. If you’d like to help Dave reach his lofty $4.000 goal for the children, you can follow the link at the beginning of the paragraph to make a donation.

Fredrik Lundh has an experimental bit of code for doing Python syntax coloring and links to specific lines/features from PythonDoc output. /stuff/sandbox/pythondoc/effbot

Guido has blogged about a generic function implementation (he uses the term Dynamic Function Overloading) that he has checked into the Python sandbox. It is good news to see work on this going into the core of Python. TurboGears 0.9 makes heavy use of Phillip Eby’s RuleDispatch package and it gives a lot of power in choosing an error handler, choosing an output format and even determining if a user is authorized for a resource, if you use a new package created by Alberto. We’re using it quite a bit behind the scenes and strategically exposing it here and there. If this becomes a standard part of Python, we don’t have to worry about people not understanding how the implementation works. Most excellent.

Update: in the comments, Bob Ippolito points out that Guido’s code is just doing dispatch by type and not by expression, as RuleDispatch does. I had noticed this originally, but tuned it out when I was posting. RuleDispatch is exceedingly powerful because of the way it handles expressions. What Guido describes is certainly a useful addition to Python and give people a chance to get used to functions being chosen at runtime, which will lessen the barriers to folks using RuleDispatch.

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