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 2007-09-20

Another successful session of non-stop technical chatter in the back of our favorite chain restaurant. Links and commentary:

The Talk Like a Pirate Day site was a victim of its own success this year. After several hours of record-breaking traffic, Chris nobly disabled the site to protect paying customers on the server. I'm looking forward to the white paper, "How to serve one million unique visitors one day per year". We also heard the origin story of Talk Like a Pirate Day and the site. I hadn't realized what a pioneer and international pirate celebrity Chris was.
jQuery UI is out. Who doesn't love jQuery?
Windows/Eclipse font weirdness.
Chris Amato had a letter in Wired. Maybe he'll notice I linked to him and come to a meeting like I've been bugging him to.
Next to Chris's letter was one from Dennis Bathory-Kitsz -- music composer, Vermonter, 8-bit computing luminary and original TRS-80 Model I warranty voider.
The RESTful Web Services book: we like it.
Evolving schemas, pre-populating databases, Core Data.
Digitizing handwritten documentation of geological data (core samples)
...which led to a discussion of all the cool stuff that the software Lou works on does.
MySQL on Amazon S3: Anybody using it?
Obligatory distributed-version-control reference: hgsvn
Notebook sleeves: Marware, CaseLogic, InCase, and at least one I forgot.
Personally I only hang out in civilized, literate online communities, but that only makes this YouTube video funnier. Caution: swearing!

Friday, September 21st, 2007
fun + programming + wmassdevs

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