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.

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