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.

Pile o'Tags

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 95836 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

The syncbox

I move between a couple different computers regularly: my old 12" PowerBook and the 15" MacBook Pro my job provides me with. Like all multi-computer users I periodically bump up against the challenges of what files (and versions) are where, especially when there's work in progress.

To further complicate things, I also have an extra laptop running Ubuntu. And sometimes I just SSH to my web server from somebody else's machine.

I spent a while thinking about solutions. Some people keep a "master" home directory on a server, using rsync to pull new copies (or freshen old copies) on machines where they work. Being an rsync fan, I tried this approach. After my first accidental rsync --delete casualty, though, I started thinking about ways to preserve history.

That's when the ideal solution hit me (making a big resonant "DUH" sound): distributed version control. Perfect synchronization: check. Multi-platform clients: check. Full history: check.

I created a Mercurial repository on my web server, then cloned it out to the two laptops.

For stuff that needs to be secure, I decided that simple command-line encryption was the answer (hence this tweet from a while back with a Blowfish encrypt/decrypt one-liner). And I use SSH for transport, so even the plaintext stuff is safe from in-transit snooping.

I call the synced directory "syncbox". It contains a little script for keeping things in sync. It amounts to these steps:

hg addremove
hg commit -m "Update"
hg push
hg fetch

Ironically, after having set all this up, I got an invite to try Dropbox, a nifty-looking service that offers many of the same benefits and many other features besides (e.g. desktop OS integration, selective file sharing, browser-based acess option). About all I can tout for advantages of my approach are: 1) unlimited history (Dropbox gives you 30 days), 2) no additional fees if I exceed 2G of storage, and 3) I control it completely.

Sunday, June 13th, 2010
mercurial + tips + tools
2 comments

• Comment from memo , later that day

But the Dropbox tend to have faster connection speed and it's not likely to fail that often, i guess. :-)

• Comment from Rick , later that day

Thanks for this. I like it.

I also had a DUH moment at roughly the same time I read the word in your post. I wrote about my implementation using Bazaar here: http://www.rickvause.com/2010/06/an-alternative-to-dropbox-using-bazaar/

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