Pinky Gone Driving Little tidbits not meant for human consumption

I have been working with a new computer code this week that outputs its results as HDF files. These are a standard format for scientific data, but they are opaque to the "naked eye". Because it is a binary, compressed format, it isn't possible to look at the files with a text editor and see what they contain (say, to learn the inner workings of a new program). But, lo and behold, I dug up a Python module called PyHDF that exposes the data as Python objects. So, since I enjoy using Python I can now poke around in these HDF files at will. This is primarily the reason that I love Python: object-orientation and a shload of contributed modules to do just about anything.