E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

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

ajax apple blogs browsers business design django ebay fp fun google hardware haskell intellectual property iphone javascript linux media mobile open source os x oscon oscon2007 palm php programming python rails rants reading risks ruby site spam textmate the well tips vcs web development web frameworks webservers wmassdevs

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

A Django site.
(Finally!)

Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

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:

and my favorite:

Thursday, August 4th, 2005
+ +
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.

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