Generally I am a big fan of Python, but today it drove me a little nuts. The solution was hard to find, but simple to implement. And the problem was probably caused by my "Java-thinking," which Pythonic folks will tsk-tsk you for.
What's great about Python is that you can easily distill your problem down to simple parts and test them directly in a script or with the interpreter. So I was able to boil down my problem to the following:
