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.

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