I recently noticed a changing behavior in how my family and friends go about buying a new mobile phone. The reason they have a mobile is to receive and make phone calls, but their selection of a model to buy is based mostly on secondary functions like built-in camera.

In itself this isn’t surprising. It’s normal and common that when features become ubiquitous, competition and differentiation moves elsewhere. Basic functionality of phones has certainly been fulfilled and it’s difficult to add a new call-related feature that would be a significant progress.

But what I find utterly fascinating is something else. Even though primary functions play no part in selection of a phone, they are still the main if not the only reason why we have them. In fact, they are what we use most and we wouldn’t buy phones otherwise.

So here’s an interesting dichotomy. Which phone is bought and when has nothing to do with why we have it or little to do with how we use it. We think we’re buying a phone and we’ll use it as a phone most of the time, but it’s features like camera or wifi that actually make a sale.

I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of days and I can’t think of any other product or service, where buyers would display the same behavior, but I have no doubt that this is only due my lack of imagination.

I wrote about a sgmllib problem a few days ago. I still may be a dolt and my code certainly needed fixing, but the bug remained nevertheless.

Hence I’ve made some small changes to sgmllib that fix problems I’ve had. New version, which passes all unit tests included in Python distribution, can be found here and I’d really appreciate if users of sgmllib could give it a go (that includes users of htmllib and BeautifulSoup).

Update: As suggested I’ve added an updated version of test_sgmllib.py, which includes an example where the old library fails and new one doesn’t.

Update 2 : It seems this is valid, even required SGML behavior.

This blog and other content of less dubious nature were inaccessible in last three days. A freak, previously unseen and therefore unforeseen scenario happened where two disks forming RAID-1, which haven’t shown a single sign of a problem, suddenly died simultaneously. As has been noted, a million to one chance scenarios crop up 9 times out of 10, so firm steps have been taken to prevent something like this from occurring ever again.

I’ve also rediscovered how I detest system administration and I’m happy to have competent friends to absolve me from it. I used to earn a part of my salary doing such work, which reminds me a lot of the war. Prolonged periods of preparations and shear boredom are pierced with short episodes full of adrenaline and occasionally terror of a fuck-up.

Another lesson form another unexpected discovery. I missed my blog as much as I did my email. A sad discovery indeed, showing I don’t prefer listening over talking as much as I should. However, there’s a silver lining in knowing that I haven’t longed for either too much.

So, this is it. Everything should be back to normal, but if you find a dead link or something not working quite as it should, I’d appreciate a line or two describing the problem.