We have a good relationship with the IRS. We overpay them over the year and they give back the interest free loan to us in May (calling it a 'refund'). Usually there is no correspondence, especially since the electronic stuff. The last time I got a letter from the IRS it was to tell me I had screwed up and we were owed a smaller refund. So, natch, when I saw this next letter from the IRS I started to grumble about socialism and how all this medical reform was going to reform our bank accounts, and why should we pay those fat cats in Washington. I opened it up and - they want to give us MORE money. Apparently we are eligible for a 'making work pay' credit that I missed! It almost quadrupled our refund! So folks, for all those skin-flints like me who do their own taxes, don't forget schedule M - if you earn less than $150000 (jointly) - which means most of us dorky lower middle class postdocs - you could get $800 back!
Python's context managers are a very neat way of handling code that needs a teardown once you are done. Python objects have do have a destructor method ( __del__ ) called right before the last instance of the object is about to be destroyed. You can do a teardown there. However there is a lot of fine print to the __del__ method. A cleaner way of doing tear-downs is through Python's context manager , manifested as the with keyword. class CrushMe: def __init__(self): self.f = open('test.txt', 'w') def foo(self, a, b): self.f.write(str(a - b)) def __enter__(self): return self def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb): self.f.close() return True with CrushMe() as c: c.foo(2, 3) One thing that is important, and that got me just now, is error handling. I made the mistake of ignoring all those 'junk' arguments ( exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb ). I just skimmed the docs and what popped out is that you need to return True or...
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