Recent

Handling CSV Files in Python

As a buddy of mine always says "the nice thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from". Take CSV files for example. CSV, of course, stands for "Comma Separated Values", more often than not though, it seems that CSV files use tabs to separate values rather than commas.

What Are They Using?

I was celebrating Leap Day (February 29) at a London pub with Mark Antony Kent, Head of Technology Strategy at British Telecom, hoping also to pump his brain for insights to follow up on a contentious FCC hearing at Harvard earlier that week—one convened to visit issues around Comcast's valving of BitTorrent traffic.

Linux Foundation TABulates the Votes

The Linux Foundation — the not-for-profit organization that keeps Linus Torvalds behind the keyboard and provides services like the Linux Standards Base and Linux Legal Defense Fund — made the results of the Foundation's annual Technical Advisory Board election official on Tuesday, announcing the election of six new members from the Linux kernel developer community.

RIAA Preys on Teen in Need of Transplant

The Recording Industry Association of America has done a number of distressing, disgusting, and disgraceful things in its never-ending quest to fill its coffers with ill-gotten gains from every American with an internet connection. The news out of Pittsburgh, however, carries what we have to class as the most depraved stunt we've seen them pull so far.

Know when your drives are failing, with smartd

“Ka-chunk... ka-chunk... ka-chunk... tick... tick... tick... Ka-chunk... ka-chunk...” That's just not a sound you ever want to hear coming from a hard drive. It's the sound of a hard drive trying to move it's read/write heads into a position that they don't seem to want to go to or its trying to read a sector that just isn't there anymore.

Python Sheds 2.x Skin

The much-anticipated next incarnation of the popular Python programming language — voted favorite scripting language in the 2008 Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards — slithered onto the scene on Wednesday with the release of Python 3.0. Known popularly as Python 3000 or Py3k, Python 3.0 bears the distinction of being the first release in the language's history to deliberately break compatibility with previous versions.