To­day is 10/10/10 (or rather 10/10/2010 which does­n't look so cute, right?) and again there's a flood of "this on­ly hap­pens ev­ery 100 years! OMG!".

At least this time it's cor­rec­t. How­ev­er:

How of­ten is 10/11/10 go­ing to hap­pen? How of­ten did yes­ter­day's 10/9/10? Ev­ery 100 years, too. In fac­t, ev­ery date writ­ten in that for­mat will hap­pen once ev­ery 100 years, be­cause that's the way dates work!

Oh, you may say, the spe­cial part is that the three num­bers are the same, sil­ly!

But then again, last year we had 9/9/9 and next year we'll have 11/11/11 (much cool­er than 10/10/10!) so ... no, not that spe­cial.

OTO­H, to­day (at 10P­M) my kid and I will see the first ev­er episode of Ben10 Ul­ti­mate Alien (hey, 5 10s!) for the first time and that... well, that has nev­er hap­pened be­fore, and will nev­er hap­pen again. That, friend­s, is spe­cial.

You can get a free Is­sue of PET: Python En­tre To­dos our python mag­a­zine.

400 will be print­ed thanks to BBLUG, Py­ConAr and Py­Day Rafaela.

I hope I can get a few for my­self, be­ing the mag­a­zine re­spon­si­ble ed­i­tor and ev­ery­thing :-)

And if you won't be there: it's CC-by-nc-sa so you can print it too!

Fi­nal­ly, a new re­lease of rst2pdf!

You can get it at its site: http://rst2pdf.­google­code.­com

rst2pdf is a tool to con­vert re­struc­tured text (a light, cool markup lan­guage) to PDF us­ing re­port­lab in­stead of La­TeX.

It has been used for many things, from book­s, to mag­a­zi­nes, to brochures, to man­u­al­s, to web­sites and has lots of fea­tures:

• Font em­bed­d­ing (T­TF or Type1 fonts)

• Cas­­cad­ing Stylesheets

• Ex­treme­­ly flex­i­ble plug­in ar­chi­tec­­ture (y­ou can do things like ren­der the head­­ings from ar­bi­­trary SVG files!)

• Sphinx in­­te­­gra­­tion.

• Con­­fig­urable page lay­outs

• Cus­­tom cov­­er pages via tem­­plates

• And much, much more...

The big­gest change in 0.16 is sure­ly the im­proved sup­port for Sphinx 1.0.x so if you are us­ing Sphinx, you re­al­ly want this ver­sion.

Al­so, it has a ton of bug­fix­es, and a few mi­nor but use­ful new fea­tures.

Here's the whole changel­og if you don't be­lieve me:

• Fixed Is­­sue 343: Plugged mem­o­ry leak in the RSON pars­er.

• Fix for Is­­sue 287: there is still a cor­n­er case if you have two sec­­tions with the same ti­tle, at the same lev­­el, in the same page, in dif­fer­­ent files where the links will break.

• Fixed Is­­sue 367: ger­­man-lo­­cal­ized dates are MM. DD. YYYY so when used in sphinx's tem­­plate cov­­er they ap­­peared weird, like a list item. Fixed with a mi­nor work­around in the tem­­plate.

• Fixed Is­­sue 366: links to "#" make no sense on a PDF file

• Made de­f­i­ni­­tions from de­f­i­ni­­tion lists more sty­lable.

• Moved de­f­i­ni­­tion lists to Split­­Ta­bles, so you can have very long de­f­i­ni­­tion­s.

• Fixed Is­­sue 318: Im­­ple­­men­t­ed Do­­main spe­­cif­ic in­­dex­es for Sphinx 1.0.x

• Fixed In­­dex links when us­ing Sphinx/pdf­builder.

• Fixed Is­­sue 360: Set lit­er­al.­­word­Wrap to None by de­­fault so it does­n't in­­her­it word­Wrap CJK when you use the oth­­er­­wise cor­rect ja­­pa­­nese set­t­ings. In any case, lit­er­al blocks are not sup­­posed to wrap at al­l.

• Switched pdf­builder to use Split­­Ta­bles by de­­fault (it made no sense not to do it)

• Fixed Is­­sue 365: some TTF fonts don't val­i­­date but they work any­way.

• Set a valid de­­fault baseurl for Sphinx (makes it much faster!)

• New fea­­ture: --use-num­bered-links to show sec­­tion num­bers in links to sec­­tion­s, like "See sec­­tion 2.3 Ter­mi­­na­­tion"

• Added stylesheets for land­s­cape pa­per sizes (i.e: a4-­­land­s­cape.style)

• Fixed Is­­sue 364: Some op­­tions not re­spec­t­ed when passed in per-­­doc op­­tions in sphinx.

• Fixed Is­­sue 361: mul­ti­­ple line­breaks in line blocks were col­lapsed.

• Fixed Is­­sue 363: strange char­ac­ters in some cas­es in math di­rec­­tive.

• Fixed Is­­sue 362: Smarter au­­to-en­­clos­ing of equa­­tions in $...$

• Fixed Is­­sue 358: --re­al--­­foot­notes de­­faults to False, but help text in­­di­­cates de­­fault is True

• Fixed Is­­sue 359: Wrong --­­fit-back­­­ground-­­mode help string

• Fixed Is­­sue 356: mis­s­ing cells if a cell spawns rows and col­umn­s.

• Fixed Is­­sue 349: Work cor­rec­t­­ly with lan­guages that are avail­able in form aa_bb and not aa (ex­am­­ple: zh_c­n)

• Fixed Is­­sue 345: give file/­­line in­­­fo when there is an er­ror in a raw PDF di­rec­­tive.

• Fixed Is­­sue 336: JPEG im­ages should work even with­­out PIL (but give a warn­ing be­­cause sizes will prob­a­bly be wrong)

• Fixed Is­­sue 351: foot­note/c­i­­ta­­tion re­f­er­ences were gen­er­at­ed in­­­cor­rec­t­­ly, which caused prob­lems if there was a ci­­ta­­tion with the same text as a head­­ing.

• Fixed Is­­sue 353: bet­ter han­dling of graphviz, so that it works with­­out vec­­tor­pdf but gives a warn­ing about it.

• Fixed Is­­sue 354: make todo_n­ode from sphinx cus­­tom­iz­a­ble.

• Fixed bug where nest­ed lists broke page lay­out if the page was smal­l.

• Smarter --in­­line-links op­­tion

• New ex­ten­­sion: fan­­cyti­tles, see //ral­si­­na.me/we­blog/­­post­s/B­B906.html

• New fea­­ture: tab-width op­­tion in code-block di­rec­­tive (de­­faults to 8).

• Fixed Is­­sue 340: end­notes/­­foot­notes were not styled.

• Fixed Is­­sue 339: class names us­ing _ were not us­able.

• Fixed Is­­sue 335: ug­­ly crash when us­ing im­ages in some spe­­cif­ic places (looks like a re­­port­lab bug)

• Fixed Is­­sue 329: make the fig­ure align­­men­t/­­class at­tributes work more like La­­TeX than HT­M­L.

• Fixed Is­­sue 328: list item styles were be­ing ig­nored.

• Fixed Is­­sue 186: new --use-float­ing-im­ages makes im­ages with :align: set work like in HT­M­L, with the next flow­able flow­ing be­­side it.

• Fixed Is­­sue 307: head­­er/­­foot­er from stylesheet now sup­­ports in­­­line rest markup and sub­­sti­­tu­­tions de­fined in the main doc­u­­men­t.

• New pdf_­­toc_depth op­­tion for Sphinx/pdf­builder

• New pdf_use_­­toc op­­tion for Sphinx/pdf­builder

• Fixed Is­­sue 308: com­­pat­i­­bil­i­­ty with re­­port­lab from SVN

• Fixed Is­­sue 323: er­rors in the con­­fig.sam­­ple made it work weird.

• Fixed Is­­sue 322: Im­age sub­­sti­­tu­­tions did­n't work in doc­u­­ment ti­­tle.

• Im­­ple­­men­t­ed Is­­sue 321: un­der­­line and strikethrough avail­able in stylesheet.

• Fixed Is­­sue 317: Ug­­ly er­ror mes­sage when file does not ex­ist

I just saw this on a place I won't both­er link­ing:

This oc­to­ber has 5 fri­days, 5 sat­ur­days and 5 sun­days. This hap­pens on­ly ev­ery 823 years. And I am ground­ed all mon­th!

Re­al­ly, it's not worth link­ing to be­cause it's ev­ery­where

There are vari­a­tion­s, of course, 5 sun­day/­mon­day/tues­days, dif­fer­ent month­s, etc.

But why are peo­ple fall­ing for that? I mean, it's pret­ty ob­vi­ous if you think 2 min­utes that there's no way it can be true!

1. The length of oc­­to­ber is fixed (31 days).

2. Since weeks are 7 days, you have 4 weeks + 3 days in oc­­to­ber.

3. If oc­­to­ber starts on a fri­­day, those last three days are go­ing to be fri­­day/sat­ur­­day/­­sun­­day.

So, for this thing to be true, Oc­to­ber 1st would have to be a fri­day on­ly once ev­ery 823 years. Sounds pret­ty stupid when you say it that way, right?

I re­al­ly have no idea how any­one with half a brain can fall for it, but I have seen peo­ple I know have a func­tion­al cor­tex do it. Com­ments en­cour­aged :-)