I’ve just been doing something that probably should never be done in Python (again), and I figured it might be useful to record this little snippet for posterity. Many Python programmers are probably familiar with decorators, which modify functions by wrapping them with other functions. For example, if you want to print ‘entering’ and ‘exiting’ to trace when a function’s execution begins and ends, you could do that with a decorator:

def trace(func):
    def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
        print 'entering'
        func(*args, **kwargs)
        print 'exiting'
    return wrapper

@trace
def f(a,b):
     print 'in f: ' + str(a) + ',' + str(b)

Note that in practice there are better ways to do this, but it’s just an example.

Anyway, it’s also possible to customize the behavior of decorator itself by providing arguments, for instance if you wanted to print different strings instead of ‘entering’ and ‘exiting’. But in that case, your “decorator” function is actually a wrapper that creates the real decorator and returns it:

def trace(enter_string, exit_string):
    def _trace(func):
        def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
            print enter_string
            func(*args, **kwargs)
            print exit_string
        return wrapper
    return _trace

@trace('calling f', 'returning')
def f(a,b):
     print 'in f: ' + str …

There are a lot of complaints you could make about Facebook, many of them legitimate, but the bug reporting process is one thing I think they really do well.

A while ago I had occasion to report a problem with the message inbox showing up as a blank page. As the first step in the process, Facebook presents you with a grouped list of categories corresponding to the different features of the site. Each one is tagged with the same icon used on other menus, so it’s easy to identify, and the images really help to visually distinguish the different categories. I much prefer that to the standard bug reporting interface, where all you get is a combo box with a long list of different products or categories (text-only of course), some of which you may not even be familiar with.

On Facebook, when you click the category that matches your bug, you get a list of the common reports that have already been filed under that category. But unlike a typical bug listing which uses the (often non-descriptive) bug report titles submitted by users, the titles are written by members of the Facebook team, and they’re all …

Normally I love The Daily Show. (Especially in HD) But Jon Stewart's interview with Marilynne Robinson last night really fell short of the usual standard. And not just because she wasn't funny. At 2:52 in:

The more you delve into science, the more it appears to rely on faith.

You know, when they start to speak about the universe, they say, well, it's actually, "Most of the universe is antimatter." "Oh really? Where's that?" "Well, you can't see it." "Well, where is it?" "It's there." "Can you measure it?" "We're working on it..."

No. Sorry. That's not science. For one thing, nobody with a clue really thinks most of the universe is antimatter. But the more important point is that observation is the core of science. If you can't see something, can't measure it, can't even produce any observable evidence that it exists, you can't pass it off as scientific fact.

I have to wonder where Jon Stewart is getting this idea that scientists are relying on faith, claiming that things are true without having the …

I’m used to using PHPMyAdmin (PMA) for managing my MySQL databases. It works fine for normal maintenance, like getting rid of the spam comments that sneak through my checks (of which there are, or rather were, none), but while setting up the new version of this site, I found myself wanting to transfer the entire contents of the database to my home computer so I could tinker with it and try to figure out how to convert it to the new format I needed. PMA doesn’t really do that. Sure, it can manage multiple servers, but it treats each one separately; as far as I know the only option for transferring data is to export it to a text file and import it into the new database. I’ve never had particularly great luck with PMA’s export function, and besides, since the whole structure was changing, I needed to take the information in each table of the existing database and split it up among different tables in the new database. I briefly considered processing SQL dump files with a Perl script but it quickly became evident that that would be a mess.

So I went to my …