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. I teach photographers web design and professional skills. 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. Its strong points include an introduction to Python, and better coverage of Django 1.0 than nearly anybody else. 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, 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

Spam Report

At least 67529 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Learning to talk good

The OSCON demographic is exceedingly well-equipped to communicate virtually. E-mail, newsgroups, blogs, IRC. But there are certain key advantages to meeting face-to-face -- like learning how to pronounce things. I now can correctly pronounce:

_foo_ (Python): under under foo
$foo (PHP): dollar foo

and my favorite:

XUL (Mozilla): zool

Thursday, August 4th, 2005
fun + mozilla + oscon
1 comment

Some related posts: Best OSCON 2006 -- er, 2005 -- photo • A Ruby happening • Mozilla goes corporate • OSCON Playtime

• Comment from Adrian Sampson , later that day

Because I began programming by fiddling around in BASIC (where a trailing character in the variable name determines type), the $ character still means 'string' to me. So, problematically, I tend to read $foo in Perl or PHP as 'string-foo'. This is usually very embarrassing.