I don't know why, but I always seem to post in spurts :) One of the things with the Garbage Collector is that it only kicks in when you actually run out of memory. Now, that's not entirely true, but the point is that it only kicks in when you allocat… more »

Bruce Schneier points out in his blog New Risks of Automatic Speedtraps that fixed speed cameras can be more dangerous than no speed camera at all because all that happens is that drivers slow down at the speed trap, and bunch up. Now, we've had fixed… more »

Wow, my first bout of comment spam! I'm honoured :) 'Course, I've deleted it all, so it was a bit of a waste of time for the spammer. Oh well, what the hell! more »

Just been reading Rory's post, titled Python-O-Rama, and it got me thinking about choice. It's not always a good thing. I won't repeat what I wrote in the comments there, but the basic point of my argument was that choice is not good when all you're… more »

Why, O why is there DVD-RW and DVD+RW? Please, someone tell me: it makes no sense at all to have two standards that are exactly the same (as far as I can see) and yet are incompatible with each other (in that a DVD+RW drive can't write to DVD-RW discs)… more »