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

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

This runs on Django, 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. 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 59053 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

The "path" module

Somewhat belatedly I've started using Jason Orendorff's path module for Python. It's great. Here's a comparison with the stock os.path facilities, grabbed from Jason's site:

# with os.path.walk
def delete_backups(arg, dirname, names):
    for name in names:
        if name.endswith('~'):
            os.remove(os.path.join(dirname, name))
os.path.walk(os.environ['HOME'], delete_backups, None)

# with path
d = path(os.environ['HOME'])
for f in d.walkfiles('*~'):
    f.remove()

The second snippet is not just shorter, it's easier to read and easier to write. I'm writing some code to recursively process a tree of short text files (Blosxom entries), and the path module is a godsend. If you're curious, see the description and examples on Jason's site; he also posted some interesting comments on Ian Bicking's blog about the design of the module.

I gather that there was significant interest in getting some version of this module included in Python 2.5, but I don't see any mention of it in the release notes. There's PEP 355 and a python-dev discussion from January. But unless I missed something (I'm still mostly using Python 2.4), it's not in 2.5 in any form. Here's hoping it makes it into 2.6...