A very common doubt developers new to Python have is how to use its threads correctly. Specifically, a large amount of questions on StackOverflow show that people struggle most with two aspects:How to stop / kill a threadHow to safely pass data to a thread and backI already have a blog post touching on these issues right here, but I feel it’s too task-specific for sockets, and a more basic and general post would be appropriate. I assume the reader has a basic familiarity with Python threads, i.e. has at least went over the documentation.So, without further ado, here’s a sample "w...

The core Perl community—if you care to draw lines around a group ofpeople who use Perl seriously and call that a community—is like manyother core F/OSS communities. Real work happens on mailing lists and IRC. Iunsubscribed from several mailing lists and deliberately spent as little timeon IRC as possible this year, for various uninteresting reasons. (I haven'teven made it to the Portland Perl Mongersmeetings for several months.)While that's been good for my productivity, it's also produced aninteresting s...

Even though it recanted (somewhat unconvincingly) its support of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), domain registrar GoDaddy continues to lose thousands of domains as an online campaign to punish GoDaddy is proving highly effective.The boycott campaign began on reddit on December 22. A day later GoDaddy announced its withdrawal of support for the House legislation it actually helped craft.And still GoDaddy has lost more than 70,000 domains in less than a week, with the prospect of more if the reddit-inspired day of boycott set for December 29 goes off as planned.GoDaddy goes from...

Remember those childhood games where you are given two nearly identical images and your objective was to find some number of subtle differences? Well, I shouldn't have to play that game when I'm using your damn website.I show here two examples of a common practice that is plaguing the modern web. First, a clipping from a project page on github.com.  And now the second image:  See the difference? My question is this: why? That edit button is the only component of the entire page that has a hide-by-default-unless-your-mouse-is-in-a-certain-vertical-and-horizontal-range behavi...

A few that come to mind, some less known, some more:xargs or parallel: run things in parallel, with lots of optionssed and awk: more well-known but still super useful for processing text files, and faster than Python or Rubym4: simple macro processorscreen: powerful terminal multiplexing and session persistenceyes: print a string a lotcal: nice calendarenv: run a command (useful in scripts)look: find English words (or lines in a file) beginning with a stringcut and paste and join: data manipulationfmt: format text paragraphspr: format text into pages/columnsfold: wrap lines of textcolumn: form...

Securing server software is not a straightforward task. Not all of our operating environments are the same, leading to a variety of potential security vulnerabilities. However, using a few basic configuration and security options, you can stay a little ahead of where you want to be.1. Fail2banFail2ban is a Python-based intrusion prevention software that detects and blocks malicious IP addresses from multiple unsuccessful attempts at software logins. In other words, if someone is attempting to login to your server via ssh, it detects multiple, unsuccessful attempts and blocks that user ip for a...

On this page I explain the two advanced event registration models:W3C’s and Microsoft’s. Since neither is cross–browser supported,their use is, for the moment, deprecated.W3C and Microsoft have both developed their own event registration modelto replace Netscape’straditional model. Though I’m notimpressed by the Microsoft model, W3C’s is very good, except for onecrucial vagueness.Unfortunately few browsers support it at the moment.W3CW3C’sDOM Level 2 Event specification pays careful attentionto the problems of the traditional model. It offers a ...

Charlie Kindel (who left Microsoft earlier this year after 21 years, most recently as a Windows Phone General Manager), posted today on an “impedance mismatch” between carriers and device manufacturers, and Windows Phone, where those carriers and OEMs are “reluctant” to push Windows Phone, while Google’s Android has taken an approach that “reduces friction with carriers & device manufacturers at the expense of end users”.Kindel seems to be implying that Microsoft has taken the road less travelled, choosing to fight it out with the carriers and OEM...