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 70644 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Camino

A lot of people who want to switch from Safari choose Firefox. There are some great reasons to do that, like the web developer toolbar. But ironically, I think a lot of Firefox's Mac mindshare is a side effect of the gains it's making (for good reasons) on Windows IE. Clearly it's the best choice for most Windows users and most Linux/Unix desktops as well. But on the Mac there are other good ones.

I've been using Camino as my main browser for a couple months now. Camino is sort of a forgotten browser on OS X, but for me it is the best available combination of a nice UI (pure Aqua), standards compliance (Gecko), and open source. Plus it doesn't suffer from Safari's weird performance glitches with long bookmark lists and with autofill. Check Camino Update to gauge momentum. They're shooting for a 1.0 release this fall.

Saturday, August 13th, 2005
browsers + open source + os x
2 comments

Some related posts: Sparkle: automatic application updates • Great open source apps for the Mac • Web Inspector, a DOM inspector for WebKit • Camino 1.0b2 • WebKit screen-grabbers • DarwinPorts 1.1 • Mining Monday: FreeBSD, KDE and Me • Cyberduck, cyberdoc • Mozilla goes corporate • Sourcemorgue

• Comment from Carlo Zottmann , later that day

I would change to Camino from Firefox any minute IF the browser would allow me to use or write extensions for it.

• Comment from Paul Bissex , later that day

Yeah. The functionality and developer buzz would be nice. We do have some customization options in the form of [CamiTools][]. (Which also demonstrates that one *can* write extensions, it's just harder!)

[camitools]: http://www.nada.de/mac/camitools/index.html