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 96060 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Which PalmOS is really next?

I'm living happily with my Palm TX, but I'm already thinking about what comes next. (It would be nice to have a multitasking operating system.)

There has always been a lot of overlap between the Mac and Palm worlds. The original developers were Apple refugees. I know this is facile, but as I look at what has passed and what's been announced for the future, I start drawing parallels between Apple's operating systems and Palm's:

PalmOS 5 is like the classic MacOS -- the dead-end culmination of a long series of incremental improvements.
The future Linux-based version of the PalmOS is like OS X -- a complete reworking of the system with a proprietary layer on top of an open source foundation.
Unfortunately, that means that PalmOS 6, the one that's supposed to arrive next, is... Copland.

I hope I'm wrong.

Thursday, February 2nd, 2006
apple + linux + palm