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!)

Cyberduck, cyberdoc

Choice of FTP clients has long been a minor religious war among Mac users. I stopped having strong opinions on this a couple years ago when I realized that transparent, read/write FTP/SFTP should really just be built into the OS. Apple's KEEPING ME DOWN again.

Anyway, somewhere along the line I switched from Interarchy (which I had relied on since "Anarchie" days) to David Kocher's Cyberduck. There's no doubt that Interarchy is the more powerful and mature program. But what I need, and what most people need, from this type of program is fairly simple. It's a graphical client, after all. There are plenty of freely available ways to accomplish more complex file transfer magic tricks -- notably rsync and friends. Cyberduck does support the ODBEditor protocol, also known as "Edit With" -- this lets you open a file from your FTP client directly in editors like BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextMate, SubEthaEdit, and Smultron that support the protocol. I use this feature pretty heavily.

It's my opinion that this software category, commercially, is going to more or less disappear. Fewer and fewer people need it, open source flavors like Cyberduck and Fugu serve most of those people fine, and one of these days Apple is going to build it in.

Meanwhile, Kocher is looking for help maintaining and writing the documentation for Cyberduck. If you like the idea of contributing to an open source Mac application but aren't a programmer, here's your chance.

Saturday, August 27th, 2005
open source + os x