E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

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

Python Web Development with Django 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

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

Spam Report

At least 70645 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Songbird almost-0.2

I posted about Songbird when it was released back in February, but to be honest I'd sort of forgotten about it since then. A discussion of it popped on the Well today and I downloaded 0.2rc3 to take another look.

Lots of progress has been made. It imported my iTunes library (it takes just the metadata, not the audio) and it works well. It's really a CPU hog, though. On my 1.67GHz PowerBook, xulrunner is taking 10-15% CPU when it's silent, 25-40% when playing.

I'm still not sold on the embedded-web-browser features, which feel generally clunky. A major exception is the way it finds audio files embedded in pages and presents them as a mini-playlist at the bottom of the window. That's very slick.

Monday, October 16th, 2006
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Some related posts: Stallman Inside • Goodbye, SCO • "Free" music from Universal • Xiph, Ogg, FLAC, et al. • Songbird, open source competition for iTunes • Hopeful news from the USPTO • Burn all JPEGs?

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