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. I teach photographers web design and professional skills. 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. Its strong points include an introduction to Python, and better coverage of Django 1.0 than nearly anybody else. 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 67581 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Developers, developers, developers

Just got back from my second meeting with the Western Mass. Developers Group. Being the only programmer in my workplace (and having been essentially solo in almost all of my software endeavors), it's really refreshing for me to talk with other actual working programmers. Plus, we understand each other's jokes.

Some topics of discussion (unordered):

FizzBuzz and code golfing
RPG and punch-cards
Can you name a program that Eric Raymond wrote besides fetchmail? (Answer: bogofilter)
$4,000 DST-change patches
Distributed version control (gratuitous mentions of darcs from me)
The fundamental turn toward concurrency in software: threat or menace or non-event?
Amazon EC2 (sounds very cool; evangelized by Chas)
Things to hate about Python
Things to hate about Ruby
Enumeration of lots of OS X stuff that's written in C++, not Objective-C
Windows Vista on a MacBook ("...I was expecting more!")
Lisp as secret weapon, a la Paul Graham (sub-question: can you name a program Paul Graham wrote besides Viaweb?)
The TextMate book
Fun with Reddit ("Check out this 40-line Haskell program that translates Ruby on Rails code into Erlang!")

Thursday, March 8th, 2007
programming + westmass
6 comments

Some related posts: Programming and Ice Cream

• Comment from Charles , later that day

Just can't find this entry:

Fun with Reddit (Check out this 40-line Haskell program that translates Ruby on Rails code into Erlang!)

Can you please put a link?

Thank you

• Comment from Paul , later that day

Sorry, I meant to put that in the "Exercises" section!

• Comment from Charles , later that day

Still looking for a clue about this enigmatic Check out this 40-line Haskell program that translates Ruby on Rails code into Erlang!

What Exercises section are you talking about?

Thank you

• Comment from Chas Emerick , later that day

>Fun with Reddit (Check out this 40-line Haskell program that translates Ruby on Rails code into Erlang!)
>
>Can you please put a link?

I don't have the link on me, but I'm pretty sure it went through reddit the same day we saw that great writeup of the Perl 6 VM written in Forth.

• Comment from Paul , later that day

Charles (not to be confused with Chas), I hate to break this to you, but it was a joke -- as was my reply. If you read programming.reddit.com long enough you start to get punchy.

• Comment from Charles , later that day

I must be getting too old to understand this kind of joke :)

Thank you for waking me up!