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.

Podcasts I actually like

As I said in my last post, I haven't found many tech/software podcasts worth sticking with, but since people have asked, here are a few that I generally like.

LugRadio. Loud men swearing in a small room. Plus Linux and whatnot. This show has some very funny moments, a rarity in tech podcasts. I hear they're going to do an all-Haskell episode pretty soon.
Audible Ajax -- good, though relatively infrequent
The Ruby on Rails Podcast is worth following. Even for a Django guy like me.
For OS X development, CocoaRadio can be instructive.
And finally, just recently I've been picking through the archives of a podcast with some interesting esoteric (for me) discussions: Industry Misinterpretations. Terrible name. It's about Smalltalk. Remember Smalltalk?

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007
audio + media + podcasting + programming + smalltalk
7 comments

Some related posts: The Language I Will Kind of Learn in 2008: Smalltalk • Podcasting Antipatterns

• Comment from James Robertson , later that day

Thanks for the kind words on the podcast! As to the name - My blog is called "Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants", and Michael Lucas Smith's blog is "Smalltalk and my Misinterpretations of Life". Dave Buck joined us later; we came up with the name by mashing the blog titles :)

• Comment from Paul , 1 day later

Ah, now I see, thanks! Seriously, though, I think you could increase your reach just by changing the name of the podcast. Though I suppose it could be worse -- you could have called it "IndustryMisinterpretColon" or something...

Anyway, thanks for producing the show, I've really been enjoying it. I especially liked the recent "Code Smells" discussion, with all its cross-language references -- somebody even mentioned [Io][]!

[io]: http://iolanguage.com/

• Comment from Marius Ursache , 5 days later

You should give it a try to Software Engineering Radio (se-radio.net) and Python 411 (awaretek.com/python/index.html). Also some of TWiT's FLOSS episodes were quite good.

• Comment from Paul , 5 days later

Good suggestions, thanks. I just found SE-radio the other day and have listened to a couple episodes now. Listening to a Java programmer explain dynamic typing to other Java programmers was interesting, though not something I'd like to do every day! Python 411 seems like a good idea, but rarely clicks for me (like I said, I'm picky). FLOSS does have some good listening -- the interview with Guido van Rossum, for example.

• Comment from Troy , 1 week later

Lug Radio is brilliant, i'm glad the user base is growing constantly.

• Comment from mrben , 10 weeks later

Heh - found your blog via your django snippet ticket system, and now I find you like LugRadio!

Will you be at LugRadio Live?

• Comment from Paul , 10 weeks later

I'd love to -- I hear Wolverhampton is lovely this time of year -- but it will have to wait until the surplus in my bank account is larger or the distance between here and there is smaller...