If you have spent much time hanging out on technical email lists or forums you might have come across the term "bikesheding" essentially it means to spend time talking about the little details which everyone has an opinion on and to some degree ignoring the important things.

It comes from …

This is a post I've had kicking around in my drafts folder for just over 2 years now so I've decided to publish it as a partly complete problem.

One of my favorite pastimes, when I'm bored, is solving the puzzles on Project Euler¹. I'm not very far through …

A few recent Risky Business podcasts have been sponsored by Thinkst and they have been plugging their Canary tools. Basically, little honeypots that sit on your network and sends an alert when something tries to access them. To me, the idea sounded pretty cool but when I looked at their …

Installing Python on Windows is not that hard, but I want the 64 bit version and I want it installed system wide and neither of these are defaults so we need to change things a little.

First we go to python.org and navigate to Downloads > Windows

Then we need …

I recently watched Raymond Hettinger - Beyond PEP 8 -- Best practices for beautiful intelligible code - from PyCon 2015. It was an ammazing talk and I'd higly reccomend it to anyone wanting to write readable Python code.

One of the first things he tackled was the 79 character line limit. That's something …