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Most Python programs end up as a combination of several modules with a main application importing them. Whether you are using the features of the standard library, or organizing your own code in separate files to make it easier to maintain, understanding and managing the dependencies for your program is an important aspect of development. sys includes information about the modules available to your application, either as built-ins or after being imported. It also defines hooks for overriding the standard import behavior for special cases.

From Bruce D'Arcus' Darcusblog comes a pointer on a U.S. Library of Congress initiative for a better date format Extended Date Time Format (EDTF). ISO 8601's problem is that almost anything is a date: if my memory serves me, some...

Continuing my effort to spare newcomers to Drupal from falling into this powerful content management system's most common traps, this time I look at a frequent cause of white screens - the sudden and scary devolution of a previously healthy...

While I'm very positive about the openSUSE team I must say that I am a lot less sanguine about some in their community. Some fans (or really fanatics) came out in force ready to attack the reviewer (me), to question my skills and even my sanity, to attack Ladislav Bodnar for posting the review, to blame the hardware, anything at all but the distro code which is, according to some, "the best release ever".

In today's networked world, connecting with customers has never been easier. Savvy marketing professionals know that they must engage with individuals directly on the Web, and smart businesses know that their customers can be their best friends--with benefits. Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo cover all of this and more in their new book from No Starch Press, Friends with Benefits: A Social Marketing Handbook.

Green Technologies and Interactive Audio are two fields not generally considered related, but a new trend may change that: "Generated Sounds for Electric Vehicles", aka "EV Audio", aka "CarTunes". When I first heard that "electric cars are so quiet, manufacturers want them to make noise", I had a strong memory flashback to 1995, when I was contracted to produce my first ringtone (Fur Elise for Sprint PCS). At the time, I thought "mobile phone plays melody when it rings" was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard of; now, it's a multi-billion dollar industry. If you think audio personalization of your cellphone is an important statement of your individuality (as many do), imagine how much more important personalizing the sound of your car will be!

Muzak grew from constant technological innovation and originally succeeded as a broadcast medium using spare spectrum, a business model rarely examined today.

Adobe today launched the help system for Lightroom 3 Beta! You can access it by pressing F1 while in Lightroom 3 Beta or by pointing your browser at http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/3.0/Using/index.html . Commenting will be enabled shortly so get ready! for more...

Stackoverflow releases a monthly XML data dump (CC-licensed) of all the data in their system. Unlike a lot of other data sets that just reflects what developers are buying, this data reflects what developers are actually using and asking questions about, which is pretty cool. I used this dataset to create a topic map that reflects the relationships among the top topics (based on how frequently the topic was used as a tag on a post) for the month of October, 2009. There was a lot of interesting stuff in here. For example, I love the fact that plain old "regex" is the main link between "php" and "c#." Also, it's interesting that only PHP has a direct link to various database topics; I would have expected databases to be more central.

William Stanek here, continuing with the in-depth look at e-readers and e-books. The recap: In my earlier blog entries, I've explored the ins and outs of e-ink, electronic paper displays (EPDs) and e-readers. Now, I'm examining individual readers as a case study in how e-readers work. As I stated in previous posts, my hope is that if you are better informed, you can decide whether e-readers are right for you. So here's another installment in the Sony Reader discussion, focusing on the features of the Sony PRS-700.