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 67591 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

iPhone hacking

Hacking the iPhone! Perfect reddit/slashdot/digg material. Except that the site's owners have requested that the link be kept off of those services, for fear of being overrun with traffic.

Update: I misread their request -- it covers puny blogs too. Which makes this post a lot less exciting. So all I can suggest at the moment is checking out the hackers' IRC channel (#iphone on irc.osx86.hu) or doing some googling.

I love how this effort has taken off. It seems futile now for companies like Apple to release a microprocessor-based product with no developer kit. People will always want to get under the covers, and they'll clearly do it with or without you.

As I said back in January, what I really want to see is a shell prompt! (Webshell is cool, but is a different beast -- it's for access to remote servers.)

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
apple + hardware + iphone