E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

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

ajax apple blogs browsers business design django ebay fp fun google hardware haskell intellectual property iphone javascript linux media mobile open source os x oscon oscon2007 palm php programming python rails rants reading risks ruby site spam textmate the well tips vcs web development web frameworks webservers wmassdevs

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

A Django site.
(Finally!)

Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

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
+ +
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.

Post a comment

Comments use Markdown syntax. Your comment will not appear until approved, which may take a few hours or more. Spammers will be torpedoed.


(Will not be shared)

(Optional)