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

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

(Finally!)

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
intellectual property + music + open source