Recently a friend of mine pointed out that I had an error on one of my pages.  It took me almost 45 minutes to figure out what was happening.  I wasn't able to reproduce the defect in my development environment.  The version of Python installed was exactly the same.  I tried executing the problematic piece of code on the production server and it did not reproduce the problem.  All of my unit tests passed... I was at a loss as to the source of the problem.

It just so happend that a few months ago I had turned on a particular configuration option in Apache that influenced the way Python works.  The reason why I wasn't able to reproduce the problem in dev was because it does not use a production configuration.  The reason why I wasn't able to reproduce the problem using a Python interpreter is because it doesn't care about how mod_python works.  Once I figured out what was wrong the fix was very simple, in fact all I had to change were two letters.

The moral of the story is: Testing is good, unit testing is great, but don't forget to test your configuration  :)

So I've landed a job with Rearden Commerce in Foster City, California.  All of our belongings [including our car] are currently in a trailer on it's way to Redwood City.  We sold our house, purchased plane tickets, and pretty much finished up all the stuff required for a move across the entire country.

Why wouldn't it be perfect timing to get summoned for jury duty in Cincinnati  :/ 

I've been reading about Hadoop and Lucene for a while now.  Today I finally started working with the demos to get a better feel for how things work.

I'm excited to learn more!

I must admit it's sorta cute watching a script kiddie try to hack your site using sql injection or whatever.  But it's even cuter when they try to get your [python] code to execute a get variable in the hopes of causing your [python] code to execute php code. 

Maybe one should return a link to Netcraft?

It's official: stripping wallpaper sucks.