E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

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

Python Web Development with Django 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.

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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 71104 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

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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