E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

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.

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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.

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A Django site.
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Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

Widescreen as Tallscreen

rotated A little-used new feature in the Displays preference pane in OS X 10.4 is rotation in 90-degree increments. I tried this feature out with the 20-inch Cinema Display on my desk. Novel -- it took me back to the old grayscale Pivot I wrote so many columns on in the '90s. A base that handled rotation would make it nicer. Also, the type and other elements onscreen just don't look as good at 90 degrees -- I don't know if it's the disparity in vertical and horizontal viewing angles, or maybe a change in anti-aliasing behavior. (Onscreen is top running in Exterminal.)

Saturday, September 23rd, 2006
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2 comments

Some related posts: The iPhone keyboard doesn't suck • iPod touch: one week down, one week to go • What is the iPhone running, really? • Palm TX: First Impressions • Evolving a new keyboard • NetGrowler
• Comment from Fazal Majid, later that day

The degradation in quality is probably due to the fact the RGB pixels are now horizontal and not in the orientation the antialiasing algorithm (which does sub-pixel smoothing) expects them to be.

• Comment from john elemans, later that day

I use Viewsonic VP2030b and VP201b in vertical orientations and the results are excellent. It's great for editing and viewing web pages.

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