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 67551 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

I filled up my GMail box

"Your message could not be sent because you have exceeded your mail quota." This actually happened two months ago.

I learned of my achievement via a mail administrator wondering why thousands of pieces of mail (spam, it so happened) getting forwarded to my GMail account were bouncing back. The bounce messages didn't say "mailbox full" or "user exceeded quota" or anything like that, so even I didn't know what was going on at first.

When I signed up for GMail, I bought into their "never delete anything" philosophy, just to see where it would end up. Now you know where it ended up -- it did take two years, though.

The cleanup was damned tedious. Sending messages to the Trash 100 at a time, then clicking "Delete Forever" 100 at a time. I did that for 1500 messages. Then, when my trash was empty, I was presented with the following message:

Who needs to delete when you have over 2000 MB of storage?!

Har har.

They've since added features that allow you to select all the messages in a mailbox, rather than limiting you to 100 at a time. I just don't know why it took them two years to do it!

Monday, September 4th, 2006
google + risks + spam
2 comments