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

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, 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 96060 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

It's not "RAW", it's just "raw"

At the end of this old post by John Nack at Adobe I found corroboration of my feeling that putting "RAW" (as in, raw image files from digital cameras) in all caps is silly. Some might feel this is a level of detail that only concerns copy editors and trademark lawyers, but I'm like that sometimes.

I've always preferred the nice, simple "raw" as the term for this sort of format. Saying "RAW" seems a little aggro ("RAW is WAR!!"), like you need to make the little devil-horns with your hand while saying it. The term is neither an acronym (RAW) nor a proper name (Raw), but rather a generic descriptor for a whole class of formats. Therefore Adobe just says "raw."

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
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1 comment

• Comment from David Krauth , later that day

As a connoisseur of fine Apple products, I too chafe at similar such erroneous designations when referring to a Mac (of the Macintosh variety) - its not a MAC (as in Media Access Control).

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