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

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

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 71104 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

PalmSource becomes ACCESS

Today, ACCESS, a Japanese company that acquired PalmSource (not to be confused with Palm, which... oh, never mind) earlier this year, announced that they will be absorbing the PalmSource brand. Probably a good thing.

I've been a Palm user for about seven years now, and have done my share of pontificating and pondering their fate, but I hadn't really read up on the ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP). The summary on their website mostly made my eyes glaze over ("standards-based software architecture ... best-in-class ... combined technology portfolios ...") until I got to this part:

[M]ajor open source components of ALP include:

A standard Linux Kernel: ALP is based on a standard open source Linux kernel (version 2.6.12 and above)

An optimized implementation of GTK+: (The GIMP Toolkit): Popular open source framework and libraries for the creation of graphical user interfaces

Gstreamer: An open source, modular and multi-threaded streaming media framework

SQLite: A high-performance database engine commonly used in embedded applications

That sounds, well, hot. Maybe it's time to learn PyGTK.

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006
linux + open source + palm