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, 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 95839 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Sourcemorgue

Last fall I got all fired up about a fork of the GPL'ed Smultron editor for OS X which we called Saskatoon. The project died on the vine, so I zipped up the source code, posted it on Sourceforge, and sent an e-mail to the few dozen people subscribed to our announcement list.

In the aftermath, I noticed an interesting thing -- with 30 downloads in one week, our "Activity Percentile" rose to 99.33%. Unless I'm misreading something, that means that only about 700 of the 100,000+ projects on Sourceforge were downloaded more than 30 times that week.

I appreciate the service that Sourceforge provides. (I think the interface may have been created by drunken monkeys, but that's a separate rant). That said, I wonder if it's wise for them to boast about hosting 100,000 projects when so many of those (mine included) are, by the numbers, of apparently of very little use to anyone.

Sunday, July 31st, 2005
open source + os x + sourceforge