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 95837 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

DRM Explained

Via the blog of old Well pal Bruce Umbaugh I learned of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's new publication "The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User's Guide to DRM in Online Music." It does a great job of picking apart the breezy claims of several leading music services. People want to be freed from the hassle of DRM, and these services know it -- that's why they make the overblown statements that the EFF has so nicely debunked.

The guide does suffer slightly from a classic defect of oppositional politics: the reader is left with a much better understanding of what's wrong than of what's right. The box listing four recommended music services is a start; I also would have listed Magnatune (which shares 50% of proceeds with artists and offers multiple formats including patent-free FLAC and Ogg Vorbis), Epitonic (which doesn't sell music directly, but offers many unencumbered sample tracks) and the free Live Music Archive at archive.org (which also contains an assortment of spoken word titles).

Monday, September 5th, 2005
intellectual property + the well
1 comment