What do you think?

Instructions: Take a picture of yourself right now. Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair - just take a picture. Post that picture with NO editing. Post these instructions with the picture.

Via Jeremy and Steve H.

I might even see one or two people at my talk, if I'm lucky. Though since I'm clashing with Simon Willison, I don't expect many.

BTW, we still need more session chairs. Don't be shy!

What a great idea. I don't want only the PDF - I much prefer to read the dead tree edition. But you can't carry dozens of chunky tech books around with you, so I want the PDF too. Clearly I shouldn't have to pay full whack twice, but the fiver that Apress is asking seems fair.

I wish O'Reilly did this.

PyCon UK 2008, at which I find myself the "Session Chair Team Captain", God help them. Given how rubbish I am at organizing London Python, I do hope I can pick my game up a bit.

Only my Time Machine backup disk had been plugged in to my Mac when it died, which is at least as bad as pulling the plug without unmounting. The backup disk wouldn't mount. Dash it, I thought.

All in all, though, I'm surprised how little I lost:

• My music, all recovered from My iPod. Thank you Senuti. It even recovered most of my metadata - play counts, star ratings, the sort of thing that only the painfully anal people like me care about. I'm very glad about this - re-ripping all my CDs would have taken months.
• My contacts were in a vCard file on my iPod too.
• My email is all on Gmail.
• My calendar, ditto, synched with iCal via BusySync.
• My bookmarks are all in delicious, accessed via Delicious Bookmarks.
• Most of my documents I managed to dredge out of email too.
• Code. All in one Subversion repository or another, naturally.

What did I lose?

• Some of my photos. It wasn't too bad - I have a backup from about six months ago, so most of them were there. I'd sent CDs to family with more recent stuff, so I could recvover those. But I know I lost some.
• A few documents. Having said that I recovered most of my documents, I was missing a few things. Most notably, I have a couple of VoodooPad documents that I keep loads of notes in, and I lost several month's worth of these. Bah.
• An episode of Doctor Who or two, grabbed with iplayer-dl. Ah well, they'll repeat them sooner or later.

Lesson learned - Time Machine is great for convenience, but don't trust it as your only backup mechanism. If it wasn't for those DVD-R backups I'd taken a few months back, i'd have lost far more than I have.

PyMock is what I've been using up till now. It's heavily inspired by EasyMock, a mocking style I'm used to. It's pretty good, really. The docs really could be better, and the failure messages are not very helpful, but it does the job.

But then I found Mox. Superficially, it's very similar to PyMock. It's also based on EasyMock. But wherever Mox does differ from PyMock, it's better.

It's much better documented than PyDoc, and has more meaningful, helpful failure messages. I think it's has more functionality, too, with some nice comparators, side effects and callbacks. StubOutWithMock() is nice too. But it's possible that PyMock has all of this - given the documentation, it's hard to tell.

Mox will warn you if you call a method on a mock that the mocked class doesn't have, which is handy. It can get confused if your mocked class uses delegation, but you can always fall back to MockAnything(). The mailing list is small but helpful.

On the downside, Mox isn't in PyPI, which is a shame. And they missed a trick not calling the documentation MoxDox. ;-)

There are many other Python mocking packages out there, too - notably pMock, a jMock style mocking library, Mock and minimock, a mocking library for the doctest unit test library.

In early development there's Mockito For Python, a port of Mockito, which will be worth keeping an eye on if Szczepan ever gets the hang of Python. ;-)

It's nice to know that the effect has a name.

Dan Abel had a similar discovery recently, when he stumbled on the term Moral Hazard, an effect he'd noticed before.