News You Can Bruise for 2005 March 24

I figured out the problem that was preventing me from running my lame IRC ripoff server such that others could connect to it. So telnet in to crummy.com, port 2000, and keep me company tonight while I write my lame BitTorrent ripoff.

It turns out the problem wasn't firewalls; it was a misconception of mine about DNS. You'd think they'd be able to find domain experts to write these books, and you'd be right. But it turned out the networking domain expert didn't have time, so they turned to me to write that chapter instead.

Update: That was fun, like a little party, in that no one showed up for hours and then a bunch of people showed up and stayed past my bedtime. I got some good advice on select().

Okay, here's something interesting. Python's socket documentation for the socket.shutdown method mentions three constants: SHUT_RD, SHUT_WR, and SHUT_RDWR. However, nowhere I can find does Python actually define these constants. It's obvious what they are because they're ripped off from C/Unix constants of the same names, and those always start numbered from zero. But it seems really weird that the socket library would forget to define these constants even though it defines a million other constants. Am I missing someplace where those constants are defined?

Sumana got obsessed with hamentashen so I made some tonight. Only one of them held its echinodermoid shape throughout baking; the others unfolded and became little tarts. I made a poppy seed filling, which was probably really expensive, but tasty.

Happy Mordecai! I mean Haman. Purim. Happy Purim.