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  1. 9/11/2007

    So, today is 9/11. I almost missed it. It’s not like it catches you by surprise, you’re not going to forget the date. But it’s just been slipping by for a few years now without much notice.

    As an event it is still very important. History …

  2. Re-raising Exceptions

    After reading Chris McDonough’s What Not To Do When Writing Python Software, it occurred to me that many people don’t actually know how to properly re-raise exceptions. So a little mini-tutorial for Python programmers, about exceptions…

    First, this is bad:

    try:
        some_code()
    except:
        revert_stuff()
        raise Exception("some_code failed …
  3. FlatAtompub

    A little while ago I decided to whip up a small Atompub server to get my head around the Atom Publishing Protocol. I called it FlatAtomPub because it was just storing stuff in flat files. I’m not committing to that name. It was also a chance to kick the …

  4. lxml.html

    Over the summer I did quite a bit of work on lxml.html. I’m pretty excited about it, because with just a little work HTML starts to be very usefully manipulatable. This isn’t how I’ve felt about HTML in the past, with all HTML emerging from templates …

  5. Workingenv is dead, long live Virtualenv!

    A lot of people have found workingenv useful, but it’s always been a bit fragile. If you’ve seen the .../site.py is not a setuptools-generated site.py; please remove it. message, you know what I mean.

    For a while I tried to refactor and improve workingenv, but it …

  6. Logo

    So Logo is 40 years old. I’ll take this as an opportunity to talk about Logo-the-language (as opposed to Logo-the-graphics or Logo-the-educational-experience). It’s a much better language than most people appreciate.

    Logo is Lisp. It’s an old Lisp but it’s very Lisp. Let’s look at …

  7. Prism

    I’ve seen talk of MS Silverlight and Adobe AIR. People talk them up like the future of web applications or something. I don’t know much about them, but I almost completely certain I don’t want anything to do with them.

    Here’s a general rule I have …

  8. What PHP Deployment Gets Right

    With the recent talk on the blogosphere about deployment (and for Django, and lots of other posts too), people are thinking about PHP a bit more analytically. I think people mostly get it wrong.

    There are several different process models for the web:

    1. CGI, where every request creates a new …

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This is the personal site of Ian Bicking. The opinions expressed here are my own.