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

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

This runs on Django, 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. 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 59052 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