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!)

Developer meeting braindump

Often after one of our Western Mass. Developer Group meetings I want to make a list of things we talked about. This time I actually did it. This only includes stuff I talked about or was within earshot of -- minus the top secret material that you can only know about if you show up in person.

C# structures and their fans and detractors
BASIC Computer Games, the book
the Amiga and "guru meditation". Amiga's not dead! Again, yet.
learning assembly language
the glories of VMS
help wanted, or at least lacking: Flash, QA, HTML/CSS production
Making life with Subversion better with svnmerge.py
Darcs again, plus Mercurial vs. Bazaar. Anything's better than CVS.
the glory of the REPL in Ruby and Python
Free review copies of books for user groups like ours (nice find, Lou!)
the iPhone -- finished writing that Ajax-based Skype client yet?
the OpenMoko phone (I can't believe they quoted Andre Gide in a press release)
Dell shipping policy: "That will take three weeks. OMG WE DID IT IN 8 DAYS DUDE IT'S A MIRACLE"
MacMall shipping policy: "We're shipping part of your order on time. Did we mention we don't have the other part yet? The part with the computer in it?"
Smalldog, trustworthy Mac merchants
Drupal, community plumbing
Trac, even Rails guys dig it
What do people do with (or think of) your code after you leave your job?
Crazy UFO photos making the rounds. (My favorite theory after checking the internets is that they are part of a viral marketing campaign for the new Transformers movie)

There was more. It would be neat to have a wiki page for each meeting where we could all dump notes. No pressure on our de facto webmaster implied! But I bet you could whip it up in Rails in, like, 90 seconds.

We had a couple new faces: Josh and Chip. Always good to see.

Thursday, June 28th, 2007
fun + programming + wmassdevs
1 comment

• Comment from Gerard, later that day

Already used svnmerge.py a few times today.

Thanks!

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