(There’s got to be a name for blog posts that you make just so you’ll be able to remember something later – or so somebody who is banging their head against a problem you just solved can find your solution via Google magic. This is one of those posts.)

A while back I started getting bizarre errors when using Python with MySQL. They looked like this:

python in free(): warning: junk pointer, too high to make sense

It didn’t make sense to me either! Tech support for my VPS and copious Google searching didn’t turn up anything I could use.

I posted about Songbird when it was released back in February, but to be honest I’d sort of forgotten about it since then. A discussion of it popped on the Well today and I downloaded 0.2rc3 to take another look.

Lots of progress has been made. It imported my iTunes library (it takes just the metadata, not the audio) and it works well. It’s really a CPU hog, though. On my 1.67GHz PowerBook, xulrunner is taking 10-15% CPU when it’s silent, 25-40% when playing.

My spam stats page was broken for a while, but I’ve fixed it. Looks like I’m rejecting about 10,000 spam attempts per day, which is significantly less than I expected given the rate of growth when I last checked the numbers a few months ago. It’s possible some of this reduction is due to the fact that I’m no longer collecting spam via spamtrap addresses, with some of those addresses (which accounted for about a third of my total spam volume) falling off the lists of spammers who actually check for deliverability.

Jason Kottke has a great list of unusual, funny and/or potentially embarrassing things that can be uncovered using the new Google Code search.

This reminds me of my old list of technically incriminating Google searches, which has proven to be surprisingly evergreen.

The venerable Eudora e-mail client is going open source, Mozilla style. I was a devoted Eudora user in the ’90s, but I’m not sure what their, you know, unique value proposition is today. It seems like even the developers don’t quite know what it’s going to be, but if you want to stay in the loop keep checking the Penelope project (including the discussion page) at Mozilla.org.

Via ArsTechnica

With English teachers for parents and a degree in literature, I’ve always felt a certain burden to uphold consistent, proper English usage. Over the past few years, though, one of the firm rules that I learned in my younger days – that commas and periods go inside quotation marks – has become impossible for me to follow.

This is an American rule, one that is mostly, if not entirely, about typographic appearance. If you place a comma or a period after the closing quotation mark, it’s kind of floating there in space. Placed before, it’s nestled tidily against the preceding letter. The American use of double-quotes intead of single makes this contrast even more dramatic.

The anti-spam operation Spamhaus, based in the UK, is being sued in an Illinois court by an individual named David Linhardt, who is listed in Spamhaus’ Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database. Spamhaus has been responding like this:

… Spamhaus, which as a British organization not subject to Illinois court orders is continuing to list Linhardt’s IP addresses on its SBL spam blocklist as usual … the Illinois ruling shows that U.S. courts can be bamboozled by spammers with great ease. Additionally, as spamming is illegal in the United Kingdom, an Illinois court ordering a British organization to stop blocking incoming Illinois spam in Britain goes contrary to U.K. law which orders all spammers to cease sending spam in the first place.