About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

Colophon

This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. 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.

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

(Finally!)

Jumpcut is back

jumpcut I got an e-mail from Steve Cook today.

For a couple years now I've been using a great little utility Steve wrote called Jumpcut. It's what I call a "clipboard stack" -- it records multiple cuts/copies and allows you to paste them back out in whatever sequence you wish. And it does all this without requiring you to use the mouse -- essential.

(I was led to Jumpcut by a comment on this post of mine from June 2004. Thank you, "sal paradise," whoever you are...)

It would be nice for something like this to get incorporated into OS X proper, but I stopped waiting for that long ago. My favorite utlility LaunchBar still doesn't have this feature, and (flamebait alert) it wasn't worth switching to Quicksilver for.

Despite its 0.5x status at the time I found it very usable. At some point Steve took a break from developing Jumpcut, but I was hooked. For almost two years I've been running 0.53b, compiled from source.

Steve's e-mail today informed me that that he's restarting Jumpcut development, which is great. It's now a universal binary, and he says he hopes to "post a version soon with newfangled technology like Cocoa bindings that would have made my life easier had they been around in 2002 when I started the project."

Check it out at jumpcut.sourceforge.net.

Monday, May 8th, 2006
interface + os x + tips