an intriguing look at software patents

When Patents Attack!Why would a company rent an office in a tiny town in East Texas, put a nameplate on the door, and leave it completely empty for a year? The answer involves a controversial billionaire physicist in Seattle, a 40 pound cookbook, and a war waging right now, all across the software and tech industries.listen to it online now, or you can download the podcast for free for a short time:http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-att...

Python mysqldb UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte

Solution: If you run into the error mentioned in the title of this post using python's mysqldb module version 1.2.1 or less, decode your data/query first: mydata.decode('utf8') (modifying 'utf8' to whatever encoding your data happens to be in) Details: So I was writing some code in python on Ubuntu, and it was working just fine. When I went to run it in RHEL, I got this error: Traceback (most recent call last):File "", line 50, in ?File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/MySQLdb/cursors.py", line 146, in executequery = query.encode(charset)UnicodeDecodeError:...