Errata Policy

Contrary to my wife’s claims I’m not perfect and I might err, but I take pride in the content I create and I take mistakes seriously. This is true about all my posts, though I consider it to be far more serious in regard to posts that are of more didactic nature and aim to nail a particular technical subject square on the head, hopefully even to serve as a future reference for some of my readers. Errors are by nature a delicate and unpredictable thing and should best be handled in a very predictable manner, thus this page explains my policy insofar as handling mistakes and glaring omissions in this blog. In the case of an online publication (like this one), fixing the error once its found is not so hard, but there’s a balance to be found between letting the readers know that you’ve erred and bombarding them with notifications of useless updates.

Hence I’ve decided to have separate policies for silent corrections and listed corrections. In both cases, the erroneous page/post will be fixed thus that it will seem as though the mistake never appeared, and will be performed as soon as reasonably possible once the mistake was spotted or reported. If a correction is deemed to be worthy of being a listed correction, in addition to being fixed it will be briefly listed on this page and a separate ‘errata’ post will be written, explaining the mistake. Errata posts will always be categorized under the newly created Errata category, but usually will not be categorized/tagged with all the tags of the original publication. This is done so that people who subscribe to a certain category and don’t want to get too many posts from me will not be notified twice, whereas people who subscribe to the blog as a whole or explicitly to the Errata category’s feed will receive all errata (and will have to ignore errata that doesn’t interest them).

Silent corrections will be done in one of two cases. First, when the mistake is a mistake of authorship (spelling, grammar, style, etc) or formatting. Second, when a (subjective) weighing of the severity of the mistake, the article’s age and the article’s importance rules that the correction is not reasonable. Listed corrections will be done in all other cases. In case of a very gross mistake, I might decide to publish the listed correction’s errata post on the same category/tagging of the same post, thus hoping to reach as many of the original readers as possible.

So there, I hope that now you feel more inclined to trust a tosser like m’self.


Listed Corrections:

Python’s Innards: Objects 102: I didn’t distinguish between Data Descriptors and regular ones. See the errata post for details.
Python’s Innards: pystate: I addressed ‘foreign’ (non-Pythonic) threads as being rarer than they really are and failed to mention their relation to embedded Python interpreters. See the errata post for details.

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