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 67591 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

DarwinPorts 1.1

There are almost as many unix software packaging systems as there are flavors of unix -- Debian's APT, FreeBSD's ports, Red Hat's RPM, Gentoo's portage, et al. Under OS X or Darwin, the two main contenders are DarwinPorts and Fink. I used Fink for a long time, but switched to DarwinPorts last year in one of my periodic retoolings, and found I liked it better. My reasons are intangible; my gut tells me that only one of these systems is going to be "the one," and that it's going to be DP. Mostly that just means I like the feel of it. It has fewer packages than Fink (2800 vs. about 5000), but seems to be gaining.

September saw the release of DarwinPorts 1.1, updated a couple days ago to 1.102. I have dutifully installed this by issuing a "port selfupdate" command. Your turn!

Saturday, October 1st, 2005
open source + os x