E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

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.

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

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

Score one for Dell, sort of

Tonight I had to get some data off a Dell Inspiron 4000 that has a totally screwed up W98ME installation. Rather than struggle again with burning CDs from the broken system, I decided to see how hard it was to get at the hard drive itself.

I didn't have any directions or anything, I just flipped the laptop over and started unscrewing stuff (I've done this since I was a kid, but have gotten a little bit better at putting things back together). My first impression was, "Boy, look at this ugly design. Little bulges and seams everywhere. How inelegant." Somewhere in the middle of that thought, having removed three likely-looking screws, I was pulling on an odd little hatch on the side and, whoosh, there's the hard drive in my hand, mounted on its little sled. A minute later it was in my external FW enclosure and connected to my PowerBook.

I don't even know if this is ultimately a better design (all those hatches and seams make the Inspiron squeaky and floppy -- and how often do you swap out a hard drive?) but at the moment all I could think was, I'm really glad this wasn't an iBook.

Now I can install Ubuntu on it.

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006
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2 comments

Some related posts: iPod touch: holding steady • The iPhone keyboard doesn't suck • iPod touch: one week down, one week to go • A farewell to Palms (hello, iPod touch) • New MacBook Pro • Obsolescence • Apple battery recall • A different kind of switching • ExpressCard: what it is • Best feature of the new MacBook Pro
• Comment from Growler , 3 days later

Of course, had it been an iBook, or any other mac, you would have just connected a firewire cable between it and some other computer, started it up whilst holding T, and the big shiny laptop would be a big shiny FW-harddisk-enclosure :-)

• Comment from Paul , 3 days later

That's an excellent point. I've had occasion to use Target Disk Mode on several dead Apple laptops. However, I still remember the hell of getting at the drive in my old 2400c...

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