Simon Brunning has a post on Java libraries vs Python libraries.

As Java person coming to Python, here are some ideas (Java doesn't have all these, but Python has to be better than Java in order to make headway):

1. Python (and Java) needs an equivalent to CPAN. This is especially true for open source stuff, since it's hard for people to know what's there. I find out about stuff because I regularly read what gets submitted to Freshmeat, as well as the umpteen blogs in my aggregator. Most people aren't going to do this. PyPI is a good start at this.
2. Update the Python Home page to make it clear how to find library code - PyPI, Vaults of Parnassus (I didn't even know what that was), any other good places to go. It wouldn't take much to help people find their way to useful python code
3. The Daily Python-URL! and Dr Dobbs Python-URL! are great resources. I've been learning a lot about Python from reading threads there. It would be great if these two could be searched to help find stuff.
4. Provide a standard installation point for library documentation, so that a developer installing python on his system has a single place to point his web browser in order to get to his library documentation, regardless of how many libraries are installed.
5. Bottom Line: it seems like there is some stuff out there, but it's not that easy to find.

Brad Templeton's article on the history spam has appeared on Slashdot and a bunch of other places. His article on what to do about it hasn't been referenced a much as the article on the history. The network of throttling servers that he proposes has a lot of nice properties. It also has the property of not depending on pattern recognition of spam content. I'm running Spamassassin on my mail server and Mozilla 1.3 with bayesian filtering turned on on the client, and I'm still seeing spam -- partially because I don't feel confident enough in Mozilla's bayesian filter to have it move spam messages aside.