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. 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. 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 71105 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Simon Willison's EuroOSCON report

Worth reading: Simon Willison's "Things I learned at EuroOSCON." Bits that I found alternately interesting or alarming:

"SVK ... lets you mirror from, branch and commit patches back to Subversion, CVS, Perforce and more"
"If a worm locked your drive with a random password, it would be illegal under the DMCA to recover your files"
"PHP 6 (out next year) will probably have namespaces"
"The European broadcast flag proposals are even nastier than the US ones"

He also praises the "amazing" stuff some people are building with Rails -- significant praise given that he's one of the developers of Django.

Thursday, October 27th, 2005
open source + oscon