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 67556 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Hello from BarCampBoston

Greetings from Boston -- specifically, BarCampBoston. My first "unconference". Nerds galore.

The format is (mostly) half-hour talks from attendees on whatever subjects interest them -- as long as other attendees have also expressed interest. It's all tracked on a big board in the lobby. So far I've been in discussions involving localization, designing for technophobes, cloud computing, physics simulation in games, and Lisp. The level of interactivity is high -- as is the collective expertise brought by the participants.

This is taking place in MIT's Stata Center, a wild-looking Frank Gehry creation that clearly houses a lot of fun regular old MIT stuff in addition to transient visitors like us. Walking down a side hall during lunch I peered through the glass of a closed door into a large office containing a pile of what looked like robots.