Citizens as reporters
Today I read (via www.smartmobs.com) this article commenting on how blogging is helping people bypass traditional news sources:
The next step is “Vblogging,” for video blogs, with images derived from digital cameras, webcames, mobile phones and palmtop computers, which are becoming ever more versatile and cheap.
“Those with a desire and a little technology [will have] the chance to write, shoot, edit and distribute video journalism on their own, even from the field,” says Forbes.com, the website of Forbes magazine.
So the challenge to traditional journalism as the determinant of what is news and how news should be filtered will only intensify.
I can’t remember a single time I’ve been a witness to an incident and my point of view matched the one journalists gave afterwards in the news. Considering that, I can only perceive the trend towards news decentralization as a very good thing.
Python code coverage and reverse engineering
I just found this Python coding style guidelines and I want to comment on the following paragraph regarding changing a function/method’s behaviour:
Even with unit testing, it’s really hard to track dependencies like this. We would need code coverage tools and exhaustive tests, neither of which we had.
I also find it hard to track dependencies in Python code and I’m aware of, at least, one code coverage tool for Python useful for improving test suites (but try to avoid some common pitfalls).