There is an estimated $730 billion in outstanding federal and private student-loan debt, says Mark Kantrowitz of FinAid, a Web site that tracks financial-aid issues — and only 40% of that debt is actively being repaid. The rest is in default, or in deferment, which means payments and interest are halted, or in forbearance, which means payments are stopped while interest accrues.

(referenced from http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/CollegeAndFamily/CutCollegeCosts/the-555000-dollar-student-loan-debt.aspx)

We will probably make it out of maple or walnut, and either paint or stain it.

Tuples are immutable lists in python (and other languages).  Very lightweight, unchangable arrays.  They are used for storing multiple values in one variable (usually a fixed number of values).

x = (1, 2, 3, 'abc')
x[0]
-> 1
x[1] 
-> 2
x[2] 
-> 3

x[3] 
-> abc
x["bob"] 
-> TypeError: tuple indices must be integers, not str

A common example is storing x,y coordinances.  You could use a tuple for that:

point = (12,38)

Python can unpack tuples also.

x,y = (12,38)

x
-> 12

y
-> 38

Enjoy.

Customers were complaining about being logged out when clicking a download link.

This particular setup is a Cisco CSS 11501 series load balancer with 2 Dell Poweredge web servers sitting behind it.  Each webserver is running apache, as well as an application server (python) which handles authentication and processing for THAT server.

For weeks, I could not reproduce this bug.  So tonight when I finally got bit by it (at home), I was clueless for a while.  The code is so simple.  A simple key lookup in a simple dictionary, yet it just was not making sense.

Here is the story:

A while ago, we were having problems with Internet Explorer downloading content over SSL.  This turns out to be a common problem with IE, so to fix it, I caused the downloads to not use SSL, which is more efficient anyway.

About 50% of the time, users (like me tonight) were tossed to the other server, which knew nothing about the user login. That is why it was complaining about the “WB4_App::$DSEG and/or WB4_App::$AuthToken must be set in order to contact the     applications server.” error message, which is not one that should normally be shown.

To make matters worse, our IP address at work was apparently always using the same server, so I could not reproduce the problem.  I’m lucky that it happened to me at home, or I would still be banging my head against the desk…