E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

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. 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. 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.

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Stuff I Use

Akismet, bitbucket, del.icio.us, Django, Emacs, FreeBSD, Git, jQuery, LaunchBar, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, Review Board, S3, SQLite, TextMate, Ubuntu Linux

Spam Report

At least 95846 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

darcs on pair.com

Shared hosting is starting to feel pretty quaint in the face of cheap and easy virtualization, but I still have some clients who use it. While doing some maintenance work today on one client's Pair.com account, I started to twitch when I realized I was about to make some changes without using version control. I checked for Bazaar, Mercurial, and darcs command-line binaries; only darcs was installed, luckily a fairly recent version (1.0.8). Problem solved.

(I could have also created a local Subversion repo -- I discovered they have a recent version of svn as well.)

This little episode also reminded me that version control has become integral to my work and that it wasn't always so. I'm embarassed to even think about how many years I spent doing web development with nothing more sophisticated than local mirrors and manual backups. One of the deficiencies of my enjoyable but spotty CS studies in the late '80s was that version control wasn't even mentioned as a concept, let alone emphasized. Too bad -- there was this newfangled thing called RCS back then. Wheeze, gasp.

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
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2 comments

Some related posts: Mercurial: good enough for now • In-place import using Subversion • Managing a Django project using darcs
• Comment from Bryan , 9 weeks later

Thanks for pointing that out. They have a the current version of git installed to!

• Comment from Paul , 23 weeks later

After working with darcs for a while I ended up installing Mercurial on the account -- darcs was periodically throwing permissions errors that I didn't have time to sort out. Knock on wood, no issues with Mercurial so far.

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