The Ongoing Saga of Making Ubuntu 11.10 Usable

Alright, I installed Ubuntu 11.10 (aka "lost all common sense" edition) on a new computer, so I have the memory of trying to make it bearable still in my head. The absolute necessary first thing to do is:

And set your login session to "Gnome fallback". This gives you a passable facsimile of Gnome 2 (aka "worked and was not useless" edition). I am a little... offended is to strong, but miffed that "fallback" means "what to use if you want to get work done and are not, in fact, a hipster," but whatever.

Set ordering in Python: why I didn't sleep last night

In yesterday's class of the Python-infused Linear Algebra course I'm taking, a fellow student noted the strange ordering of items in a set when printed. It seemed that the printed order of the set items always swapped the first two items, but left the rest unchanged. I don't know what sets he tried, but I was interested in the general behavior, and so began my quest through the Python source code...