> The biggest offender here is the bare except: pass clause. Never use these. Suppressing exceptions is simply dangerous.

This doesn't apply if you're using exceptions as control flow, which is idiomatic and recommended Python behavior.

Let's say you want to make sure some file doesn't exist before you start doing something. Specifically, you want to wipe it out if it exists, and you don't care if it doesn't exist. You do:

    if os.path.exists(temp_file):
        os.remove(temp_file)

This isn't idiomatic Python behavior. Instead, you want to use exceptions:

    try:
        os.remove(temp_file)
    except OSError:
        pass

Mind you, an actual bare "except:" (without specifying an exception type) is still bad, because that'll catch things you don't want being caught, like a SystemExit or KeyboardInterrupt, but it's perfectly acceptable to silently pass in this case.