E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Then I taught photographers how to create good websites. I co-wrote a book along the way. Now I am helping turn a giant media corporation into a digital enterprise. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

Pile o'Tags

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Stuff I Use

Akismet, bitbucket, del.icio.us, Django, Emacs, FreeBSD, Git, jQuery, LaunchBar, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, Review Board, S3, SQLite, TextMate, Ubuntu Linux

Spam Report

At least 184673 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 has arrived

OK, no more grousing from the FUD department about how OpenDocument isn't actually supported by any shipping applications. OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released yesterday, making it the first office suite which uses OpenDocument as a native format.

(KOffice, which reads and writes OpenDocument via filters, says native support is coming in its 1.5 release in a few months.)

For us Mac users, there's a bit of a lag -- NeoOffice/J is still at 1.1, and even the X11 builds for Mac OS X have not caught up to the release yet.

Even if you don't want to download the whole thing, check out the list of new features -- besides OpenDocument you have improvements in native GUI support (so it looks like a "real" Windows app on Windows), floating toolbars, PDF export improvements, mailmerge wizards, digital signature support, and improved database tools.

I'm not much of an office-suite kind of guy, but this release is really good news.

Friday, October 21st, 2005

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