James Bennett

958 Followers
61 Following
1.7K Posts

The man with the plan and the pocket comb.


Ex-Mozillian.

I have enough opinions of my own to tell you about, without wasting time trying to give you my employer's.

Don't forget to tip your servers and normalize your Unicode.

Pronounshe/him
Bloghttps://www.b-list.org/
GitHubhttps://github.com/ubernostrum
Bluesky (tech stuff)https://bsky.app/profile/b-list.org
Bluesky (angry politics)https://bsky.app/profile/ubernostrum.bsky.social

New blog post: Rewriting a 20-year-old #Python library

https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2026/mar/23/20-year-library/

Rewriting a 20-year-old Python library

Way back in 2005, lots of people (ordinary people, not just people who work in tech) used to have personal …

James Bennett

I am not traditionally a Pokémon completionist, but I decided to be one for Scarlet/Violet.

All storylines complete, all Pokédexes complete. Took a lot longer and a lot more effort than I expected, but it's done.

New blog post: Rewriting a 20-year-old #Python library

https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2026/mar/23/20-year-library/

Rewriting a 20-year-old Python library

Way back in 2005, lots of people (ordinary people, not just people who work in tech) used to have personal …

James Bennett
So, given the state of air travel, how are people planning to get to PyCon US this year? Is this going to be the year of Amtrak to the conference?

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@ubernostrum/116184516972371923

I’m still looking for resources here if you know of any (tl;dr a company threatening debt collection over an account they admit is not mine).

I suspect a single piece of correspondence on law-firm letterhead resolves this, but for every firm I've talked to the dollar amount at issue is too low to even justify talking to one of their attorneys.

If you’re looking for a nice, modern, featureful #Python package and environment manager, may I suggest PDM?

And maybe also toss some funding their way.

https://pdm-project.org/

Introduction - PDM

I keep getting offers from randos offering to setup various crypto currency things to sponsor me or curl.

I will NEVER agree to have my name associated with any crypto currency efforts/scams. There's no room for debate. A hard no.

tl;dr I'm looking for an attorney (California), urgently, to help deal with an unpleasant company.

Longer context: once upon a time I was a customer of a hosting company called Slicehost. But as you may know, they were acquired by Rackspace, and eventually merged fully into Rackspace's hosting offering. I reacted to this by gradually migrating things off Rackspace and to other hosts. The last thing left was a site I helped run for a community I was a member of.

Rackspace gave me headaches and runarounds trying to close out the account once I no longer needed it, so I used their account-transfer process to give ownership of the account to someone else who was stepping up to run that community site. That was completed in 2018.

Apparently, Rackspace kept that account open all these years, and that whole time was taking a few bucks a month from the new account owner for the privilege of having an account (nothing was hosted on it anymore, that I'm aware of). Until, apparently, late last year when he stopped paying. I have no current contact information for him.

I only know this because Rackspace has been sending *me* emails about their problems trying to get money out of him. I've gone multiple rounds now with their customer service trying to get them to leave me alone. This week I thought I had succeeded because they told me the account finally closed, and they also told me, on the phone, that I don't owe them anything as they acknowledge it's not my account and hasn't been my account since 2018.

But in the last 48-ish hours:

* I've discovered they were still putting my name and an old mailing address on the invoices they were sending
* I've been told by a different support person that I am somehow a "billing contact" for the account despite all the other support people telling me I have no responsibility
* I received an email (this morning) from Rackspace claiming to be a "Final Demand Letter" and threatening the use of a collection agency

Self-serve resolution by trying to interact with their people has failed. I am now actively looking for an attorney who can help me resolve this swiftly and efficiently. Recommendations for what *kind* of attorney, and for anyone you might have worked with and liked in the past, are welcome but also understandably time-sensitive.

If you ask AI to rewrite the entirety of an open-source program, do you still need to abide by the original license? In philosophy, this problem is known as the Slop of Theseus
@chrisjrn I have struggled my entire life to relate to incurious people and one of the biggest challenges of my life remains understanding those who do not seek to understand