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

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

This runs on Django, 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. 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 59046 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

History lesson

This has been going around -- give people a peek at what commands you run most often. I ran this on my server, where I spend most of my shell time:

> history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
  103   hg
   81   cd
   67   ll
   29   ./manage.py
   23   ab
   21   re-ap
   17   hgup
   14   svn
   13   cat
   12   ls

Notes:

Mercurial has pushed my use of Subversion way down.
I can't remember what I was benchmarking with ab, but I'm sure it's faster now!
re-ap is my alias for restarting Apache (re-po restarts Postfix, re-my restarts MySQL, etc.).
hgup is a simple shell script that updates the live instance of my site by fetching from the Mercurial repository in the staging instance. It would make a neat Django custom management command, but not one tied to a particular app.

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
blogs + django + fun + mercurial + unix