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!)

Interview with TextMate creator Allan Oddgaard

Over at Rands in Repose there's a nice, if short, interview with Allan Oddgaard, creator of my favorite text editor TextMate.

For me the core of TextMate's power comes from its bundle and scope systems. Allan has a little bit to say about that in the segment of the interview about sources of inspiration:

A big non-editor inspiration was CSS selectors which is what I recreated as scope selectors. The first time I read the CSS specification I was pretty excited to try out the concept. Unfortunately I did not have access to any browser which implemented it, so I started writing my own implementation, though I never got very far with it. Still, a seed had been planted and on an unconscious level I have probably tried to find a place where I could implement them, ever since.

Sunday, January 28th, 2007
programming + textmate