Rotonyms are words that ROT-13 in to other words. I discovered the term from this site, which I found during my morning Reddit session. I think the author invented the term, because the only reference I found to 'rotonym' came from his site. Long story short, I knocked out a Python script to find all the rotonyms, given a list of words (just for the heck of it). I like problems like this. Its like the kind of work you had to do in high school and uni, before you enter the real word of programming and discover that most problems have blurry definitions and its hard to tell if your solution actualy works in all cases. Here's the code, let me know if you have a better solution. continue reading…

I have create a google code project for my Python netstring module.

So what is a netstring? A netstring is a way of encoding strings of data in a file or network stream. The classic way of doing this is to terminate the string with a special character, such as carriage return, line-feed or a null byte. But this means that when reading the encoded data you have to check every character in the stream to see if it is the terminator character -- which can be inefficient. It also makes it impossible to encode a string that contains the terminator character, because it will be incorrectly interpreted as the end of the string. Netstrings solve both these problems by encoding the size of the string up-front. continue reading…