Damian’s notes

Entertaining twitter thread on a bug (that wasn't a bug really) caused by changing keyboard-layout conventions and the accommodations made to support old keyboards on new computers.

Access-control lists are often set up to answer the obvious question "can X access Y to do Z?" but not other useful things like "What are all the Ys X can do Z to?" But this needs to be planned in from the start, or you will be sad later on.
(Twitter thread.)

We are used to treating databases as a pluggable back-end for storing inert data for processing in our code, but the PostgreSQL database has many features for slicing and dicing the data and doing analysis than one might think.

A simple, correct PEP517 package builder—in other words a replacement for disttools/setuputils/whatever.

PEP 517: A build-system-independent format for source trees. This is an attempt to do for Python packaging what WSGI did for web frameworks: create a framework in to which appropriately simple or complex guild systems can be plugged.

Checklist for programmers working on almost any web site that processes peoples’ names, even if it is just in the login & profile sections. The upshot of this is most of the clever ideas you might have for parsing and making deductions from a person’s name are probably not generally useful and should not be attempted!

Naming authors, and processing people names in general, is a tricky subject. Here is a note on just some of the variability an internationalized application that handles names must take in to account.

Justine Tunney’s Cosmopolitan Libc ‘makes C a build-once run-anywhere language, like Java, except it doesn't need an interpreter or virtual machine. Instead, it reconfigures stock GCC and Clang to output a POSIX-approved polyglot format that runs natively on Linux + Mac + Windows + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD + BIOS with the best possible performance and the tiniest footprint imaginable.’

Python 3.9 adds IANA time zone support. Its tzinfo implementations behave slightly differently from the pytz package used in Django when it comes to calculations crossing daylight-savings-time boundaries, so there is going to be a gradual process of replacement and deprecation in future versions.