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I've just read through the Python 3.1 changelog, and it has encouraged me to write up something that I've wanted to say for a while, but never quite got round to: dear open source developer, please write good changelogs for your project.

What do I mean by changelogs? Historically, the term has meant something akin to "Our version control system sucks, we need to keep track of logical changes by hand". This leads to a "changelog" that looks something like this:

If you're like any developer not involved with the project, that changelog entry is a complete parse error. You have no idea what the actual change is, whether you should care, whether the change was cosmetic or semantic... A compiler analogy would be that if the version control logs are machine code, this is a barely decorated disassembly.

Humans generally don't want to read a disassembly of version control logs. They want to know what changed at a higher, human level, units of change that can be grokked in terms of new tools available to them, new syntax, new libraries, what they need to change in their data to ensure compatibility...

A good changelog doesn't just disassemble version control logs. It presents an executive summary of a whole slew of changes, in terms that make it clear why I, the end user, should be giving a damn.

Thanks for your attention.

Given the recent interest in DNS and its role in the public infrastructure of the Internet, sparked by the release of Google Public DNS, here’s a hack that can help you save keystrokes in the browser while accessing your favorite sites. Instead of typing in “youtube.com” or “twitter.com”, you can just type “y” or “t”. If you’re looking for a map of San Francisco, CA, you can type “map/sf” and jump to the right place in Google Maps.

A bright bold blinking marquee disclaimer before we start: this is advanced territory. If you don’t know what sudo is and why 127.0.0.1 is special, be careful following these instructions because you may unintentionally destroy your ability to do anything at all on the Internet — including looking up instructions for getting unstuck. Also, these instructions only apply to Mac OS X and Linux, or other UNIX variants.

Redirect custom DNS hostnames to frequently-accessed sites

The file /etc/hosts on your machine is consulted by the DNS resolver before making a request to a DNS server. The idea is to add new DNS entries to the hosts file on your machine, pointing short domains such as g and t to 127.0.0.1. Now, whenever you type g or t into your browser, the hostname will be matched from your /etc/hosts file, instead of receiving an NXDOMAIN reply (i.e., this domain does not exist) from an upstream DNS provider. Since this request is received by your own machine, you can then handle it to do whatever you want, including, but not limited to, redirecting the user to the intended destination.

This HOWTO assumes that Apache is installed and running on your system with PHP and mod_rewrite support.

Modify /etc/hosts

Open /etc/hosts in your favorite text editor, and add one line for each shortcut you’d like to set up. Leave everything else unchanged. (You will need to sudo edit this file.)

You can test that this change worked, by typing in the address (e.g. http://g/ in your browser. Instead of seeing a page that says that your browser “can’t find the server ‘g’”, now you would see a page saying that your server isn’t configured correctly, or welcome t