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Another one I learned from Happy Traum’s DVD.

Railroad Bill

A nice little mystery, courtesy of my Mom. Thanks Mom!

Pollan recounts our co-evolutionary relationship with the apple, the tulip, the marijuana plant, and the potato. Very good stuff.

Up until recently, if I needed to launch a child process from a Python program, I would use the system() function in the os module, because it was the easiest one for me to remember how to use. This is despite the fact that system() is rarely what I actually wanted.

For starters, os.system() runs the command in a shell, so unless you are actually using the shell redirection operators or argument expansion, the function is just launching a shell in order to run the program you really wanted to start in the first place. Second, the shell is going to interpret your arguments the way shells do – splitting arguments on spaces, expanding wildcards, etc. If one of the arguments is a filename with spaces and shell special characters, you have to escape it very carefully (and in a system-specific way) to prevent the shell from messing with it. Naturally, I often just wouldn’t bother and thus my commands would fail whenever a strange filename showed up.

The online gallery at The Institute of Official Cheer is one of the few things that reliably makes me laugh until I cry. The book is a fine addition to the Institute’s offerings.

A travel writer takes broad aim at the travel writing industry and quite a bit more. Did you know that New Zealand is the junior varsity version of the Pacific Northwest? And that Eric Clapton is the most over-rated guitarist in modern times?

I don’t know how to describe this book. Damme good, ’tho. Feller knew what he was about.

A new DVD & booklet of John Hurt tunes by John Miller means new recordings!

You’ve got to Walk that Lonesome Valley

This is a large collection of articles on the subject of beauty in software engineering. There are some real gems here, including articles by Brian Kernighan and Jon Bentley.

There are also a lot of rather dry articles where the author basically pats himself on the back for some project X he worked on.

I suppose that’s what they were asked to write about, but Kernighan, who has no doubt written more beautiful code than any other author, has the class and the tact to pick someone else’s code to write about.

I have a rule that if Howard Stern and John Cleese both endorse a book, I’m going to like it. I’ve never applied the rule until now, but so far it’s holding up.