About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. I teach photographers web design and professional skills. 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. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Its strong points include an introduction to Python, and better coverage of Django 1.0 than nearly anybody else. 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

Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

Spam Report

At least 67564 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Useless script: View180

Upside down For reasons that will remain mysterious, I was asked about the possibility of an OS X program or script that would allow you to quickly rotate the contents of any window 180 degrees. I had written some image processing scripts before, but nothing involving screen capture, so I got interested. I came up with this Applescript, View180, which if nothing else is a neat demo of a couple of undeservedly obscure OS X commands, sips and screencapture.

The meat of the script is:

do shell script "screencapture -iWx " & pngFile 
    & ";sips -r 180 " & pngFile 
    & ";open " & pngFile

The options on screencapture there are: "iW" to start in window selection mode (you can press the spacebar to toggle to mouse selection mode), and "x" to keep it from making sound effects.

Saturday, October 22nd, 2005
fun + os x