Log critical/connectivity errors to a local disk.

I smoke; most of my family smokes, around half of my acquaintances. As best as I can tell:

External messages (warnings, PSAs) have a negligible effect on people who already smoke. The psycho/physiological considerations are much more a factor than how graphic a warning message is.

Instead, they should be doing this study on people who don't smoke. The real goal is prevention.

Personally, I'm a programmer so I don't worry about warnings anyway, only errors.

Unfortunately smoking errors tend to be fatal ones.

Too wordy. The second the words "that page doesn't exist" roll across the brain, most users are gone to the next thing.

404 requires three short sentences: Couldn't find that page. It's been reported to our developers. Here's a link that'll maybe get you closer to where you're going.

Sorry, no. I do most of my work in Python and would love to see quick Py3k adoption. But 2.3 was released 29-Jul-2003 and is still the baseline for portable code. Pythonistas are just as much a victim to the forces against migration as PHP and "other language" coders.

Just for kicks, try getting a stable webapp stack running on 2.6. I'm still not near ready to put that into production (and I run tiny, tiny websites).

I run a stable CherryPy app on 2.6 . It was a bit painful for about a week after 2.6 came out, but became stable pretty fast.

There are a whole lot of possibilities for a "webapp stack" in python. What are you running your sites on top of?

The Python LDAP and psycopg2 libraries are my biggest culprits.

My point is not that it's impossible to run 2.6; but setting it up requires a level of sophistication with Python/*nix that I can't put on the shoulders of my organization, yet.

If I were working with a couple of smart hackers, this would be a non-issue. But my feeling is my organization is like a lot of others, where anything that's not a tagged, stable "sudo apt-get install" away is not going to fly.

Ahh, yeah it does require a good bit of familiarity with both python and *nix environments.

I'm a lone guy, managing my own servers, with complete control over their environments. That's quite a bit different than a business environment, corporate or not.

Google App Engine uses 2.5.2 and that seems stable.

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine....

I think he is using the "enterprise" definition of "stable", which means "really, really old for no really good reason".

2.5.2 is "latest stable" for me, I've had no problems with it.

The latest draft of Linux Standard Base appears to specify Python 2.4. I wish we could rely on everyone having ctypes and ElementTree in the standard library, but no luck.

(I think web.py 0.3 and possibly the trunk of Django can handle Py2.6, but obviously they're not going to drop support for older versions any time soon.)

Would have passed over it if not for your comment.

Read, worthwhile, archived. Thanks.

+1 for print version.

Print version == less size per paragraph in bytes and visual overhead. This is especially good for mobile browsing, and I can't think of one instance where I would have missed something in the "web" version.

Unfortunately internet writers are mostly paid with ads. I see Forbes, however, was wise enough to include an ad on the print version.

My comment was aimed at HNers, who graciously post the link directly to the print version from time to time. Just wanted to encourage this :).

Haha yeah HNer's aren't exactly the type of people who click on ads.

yes. i wish most sites would go on a markup diet.

One step at a time. In big companies "glacial" is the standard speed of evolution.

Think about how hard it is to port code you wrote to another platform. Now think about porting flimsy code that relies on a set of interactions in an opaque system not functioning as you'd expect.

It's frustrated comedy. I'm sure doctors have a "10 things we want our patients to know" inside joke about us, too.

But they probably do a better job of saving it for when they're talking with other doctors, rather than posting it on the internet where everyone can see it.

Also: Spending most of your time complaining about how stupid users are, etc., makes it a lot harder to empathize with them and not sound like a standoffish IT guy. (Most people are probably not as good at compartmentalizing as they believe.)

If memory serves, _Time Management for System Administrators_ (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007836/) has a good chapter about how to be helpful and reasonably polite with non-technical people when you're being constantly interrupted and the server closet is on fire (with an emphasis on little things that show you're actually trying to fix things and not just blowing people off, since many people won't necessarily recognize e.g. scowling at firewall logs as working on their problem).

"Frustration comedy" is a good term, by the way.

Quality of the article aside...."But they probably do a better job of saving it for when they're talking with other doctors, rather than posting it on the internet where everyone can see it." Huh. Thing is, they didn't put it up where "everyone" could see it. Not even YCNews can do that. They put it up where "anyone" that found it could see it. Which is kinda part of the idea of an internet, isn't it? Otherwise how would they share it with other "techies"? (Or doctors or whoever) Well, some subsets of everyone won't find my post worthwhile so... I shouldn't allow it to exist? Seems like that would rule out all content ever, more or less.

Of course, beyond that, I suspect we need to have more inter-discipline discussion where techies and doctors can come to understand one anothers gripes in the search for a "better way"... but I don't know how well that could ever really work given human nature.

> They put it up where "anyone" that found it could see it. Which is kinda part of the idea of an internet, isn't it? Otherwise how would they share it with other "techies"?

Agreed. "Anyone", rather than "everyone". (I tried different phrasings about how, unlike doctors, "techies" are likely to communicate semi-publicly on the internet, but I stumbled with words and decided the other aspect was a more important point to make.)

And about inter-discipline discussion, absolutely. It's often difficult, but very necessary.

I wasn't advocating actually behaving like that. My whole point was: it's a joke.

As for the "posting in public": http://politedissent.com/archives/603

edit: Added the link.

Ok, conceded. (My other point is more important, anyway.)

Yeah true - Although - I have seen cultures that take this as more than a joke.