About a year ago, we started out doing Python development with simple rst2htmldocuments for requirements, design, etc. In the code, we had comments that used epydoc with the epytextmarkup language.

No, it wasn’t confusing. Free-text documents (requirements, architecture, design, test plans, etc.) are easy and fun to …

Learned about module globals the hard way.

The mod_wsgi daemon by default spawns 15 threads. This is important, but not obvious.

During load testing, we had intermittent weird errors. We were seeing an odd inconsistency in replies. My experience in creating military software in the ’80’s leads me to …

On Stack Overflow I was captivated by "What tools would you used to write a modular database in Python? " and "Implementing a 'rules engine' in Python ".

Both questions are quite amazing because they already have a modular, flexible rules engine (called "python") but it's not good enough: they want to …

The Windows and .NET watch column, February 1, was Python: arbitrarily interesting . For certain classes of "interesting" problems, where interesting is defined arbitrarily, Python is an easy way to tackle those interesting problems.

It picks out a few specific areas of IronPython application, which is good and bad. Good because …

Check out Binstock's January 15th column in Software Development Times, Integration Watch: The End of PERL?

Very compelling case, generally free of the kind of subjective rants that often characterize analysis of PERL's viability. I tell people to drop PERL all the time, but I don't often have as clear …

Thing 1 -- My son's album is out today. You can visit the Siva Noir site. You can buy from their site or iTunes. Samples are available on their MySpace page.

Thing 2 -- More updates on Python 3.0. The story is not on the SD Times web site yet, but …

I've received a steady flow of email on Building Skills in Python and Building Skills in OO Design .

Readers have located a number of mistakes. It's been easy to correct and republish these books on-line.

At some point, I'll have to start the Python 2.6/3.0 revisions.

See Configuration Options in Code or INI Files? . Also, see Python as Configuration Language .

Here's some of the argument.

• Editing. Which is easier? Which is more expressive? Some say that Text (INI format especially) is easier -- but I don't see what. Python is just as easy as INI, and has …

See this question on Python objects deleting themselves . There was some fundamental confusion about objects, deletion and garbage collection.

Some additional material was posted in an answer (not in the question, where it belongs) making it a little hard to go from question to answers. The original poster's non-answer had …

After some processing by customers and us and vendors and god-alone-only-knows who else, our statistician has 4 zip files, each about 15Mb.

Step one is to look inside the zip archives and see what we have. Clearly, we can do this any of several ways. Looking manually doesn't get us …