just to make sure it was firmly established that she is the coolest girlfriend in the world, lani got me the <a href=”http://www.fingerworks.com/ST_product.html”>Touchstream keyboard</a> that i had been yearning for.
the touchstream is a unique device. it is a combination of keyboard and mouse in one unit using something similar to a trackpad for the
entire thing. there are no keys. the surface is totally flat and it uses a microprocessor to figure out where your fingers touch the surface and maps those to keypresses or mouse events.
there were basically three things that make it an attractive device: 1) it requires essentially no force to hit a key (since nothing is being depressed) which makes it very easy on your wrists. with practice, it is also potentially faster to type on than regular keyboards because your fingers don’t have to move as much. 2) you can use the mouse without moving your hands away from the keyboard; your keyboard and your mouse are always right below your fingers, you don’t
lose any time switching between them. and 3) it also supports gestures. the onboard processor detects certain motions and converts them to multi-key sequences like Control-x or Alt-backspace.
i’ve only been using it for a few nights now and not that heavily (the docs recommend not using it more than an hour or two a day for the first few weeks because apparently, when you are learning to use a new interface device, you tend to tense up and that can lead to RSI). my impression so far has been largely positive.
first, the learning curve for being able to type on it is just as steep as you would imagine. without tactile feedback, you basically have to learn to touch type all over again. on a regular keyboard, i
can probably type a nice moderate 40 words a minute without looking at
the keyboard or making too many mistakes. after playing with the
touchstream for a few days now, i could probably get about 30 wpm but
with about a 30% error rate. i have to slow down considerably to
eliminate mistakes. if you have any imperfections in your typing
technique, the touchstream basically amplifies them into mistakes. eg,
using the touchstream has made me notice that i have a bad habit of
hitting the ‘c’ key with the ring finger of my left hand rather than
my middle finger. similarly, i reach for the ‘p’ key with the ring
finger of my left hand rather than using my pinky like i should. on a
regular keyboard, i’m probably just barely hitting those keys. the
touchstream is less forgiving and those and a dozen other bad habits
i’ve learned to compensate for over the years just don’t fly. you also
have to be really good about keeping your hands in the proper position
hovering over the home row, just like typing instructors keep telling
us is necessary for fast typing. all in all, using the touchstream is
like having the ultimate fascist typing instructor scrutinizing your
every keystroke and not letting you get away with anything. it’s
slowing me down right now, but i can feel that if i keep at it, it
will improve my typing overall.
for as much time as i spend on the computer, i’ve been pretty lucky
with RSI. the only thing that really bothers me is using the mouse for
long periods of time. because using a mouse hurts, i’ve gravitated
away from GUIs and instead rely more on text and console
applications. the bash commandline, emacs, ion, and mozilla/phoenix’s
type ahead find are my bread and butter. once you get efficient with
keyboard driven interfaces though, you start to become painfully aware
of how inefficient most mouse driven interfaces are, especially the
overhead of switching from mouse to keyboard and back all the
time. the most appealing aspect of the touchstream to me when i was
just drooling over pictures was that it would basically eliminate that
overhead and make it possible for me to actually use the few mouse
driven applications i need to deal with as efficiently as the key
driven apps i’ve been spoiled on.
i was mistaken though. yes, having the keyboard and mouse both right
there and having no overhead switching between mousing and typing has
made a lot of applications easier and faster to use. but the killer
feature of the touchstream turns out to be the <a href=”http://www.fingerworks.com/touchstream_gesture_guide.html”>gestures</a>. unfortunately,
they are awful hard to describe. the multifinger gestures start with
the shift key. since drift can be a big problem on a keyboard without
tactile feedback, stretching your pinky out all the time to hit the
shift key is not such a good idea. instead, on the touchstream, you
can just drop all four fingertips of one hand on the home row and that
acts as a shift. control and alt are similarly easy. dragging the four
fingertips of your right hand up or down will scroll up or down like
using a mousewheel. there are also very intuitive gestures for back
and forward in web browsers, cut/paste, and most of the common emacs
commands. my favorite though is probably the cursor control. if you
slide two left hand fingertips around, it will move the cursor around
through text like it was a mouse pointer and you were using a
trackpad. it doesn’t sound very impressive but it only takes about 3
seconds of actually playing with it before you can’t understand how
you ever used the inverted T arrow key pad before; having to hit
different keys to make the cursor go in different directions seems
downright primitive.
overall it has pretty much lived up to all my expectations. the only
negative things i can think of to say about it are that it isn’t
wireless so i can’t sit on my couch and use it with the projector, and
it isn’t customizable or programmable; you change between a few
different preconfigured modes (windows, linux, mac, photoshop, emacs
modes, etc.) but you can’t enable or disable specific gestures or
define your own new gestures.
the device even gets good marks for durable construction. there are no
moving parts so hopefully nothing to wear out. if you spill your drink
on it, you can just spray some windex on it and wipe it clean.
so debbie, daphne, <a href=”http://so_i_was_thinking.blogspot.com/“>blair</a>, angela, lani, myself, and 9 random avenue d groupies all squeezed ourselves into a 15 person van and drove up to the land of ice and snow.
the drive up was pretty much hell. we left early in the morning, it was crowded and hot, and i was way in the back of the van where it bounced around like a rollercoaster. unsurprisingly, some motion sickness occurred.
this weekend’s downtime was brought to you by Microsoft SQL Server.
apparently a few machines in the server room were infected with <a href=”http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/25/1245206&mode=nested&tid=109”>the worm</a> and generated so much traffic that the network people had to reboot the router sometime on saturday. this, unfortunately, meant that i needed to refresh the network interface on the server for it to reconnect to the network. so it was stuck until i could come in this morning, log in to the console and type ‘ifup eth0’. once bitten, i now have a script that runs every hour and runs that if it can’t find the network so this shouldn’t be a problem again.
still, i’m sick and tired of being fucked by microsoft worms. i haven’t run any MS code on any of my machines for about 3 years now. i keep up to date on security patches on the stuff i do run. and still, every few months i have to deal with the fallout of Nimda, or Code Red, or Melissa, or whatever that week’s worm is.
ok, i guess it isn’t fair to blame microsoft. the vulnerability that this worm exploited was fixed in a patch from last june. if people would actually apply their security patches, these things pretty much wouldn’t happen.
you may have noticed that you were redirected here.
i’ve got thraxil.net setup now with the new codebase on a temporary server. i’m redirecting thraxil.org and thraxil.com to thraxil.net for the time-being. things will be on thraxil.net for probably a week or two while i rebuild the machine that thraxil was once on and will be on again. once that’s rebuilt i’ll get the code set back up there and have thraxil.net redirect back to thraxil.org. that should make it about as painless as a server move really can be.
if you look closely, you may notice a few new things: 1) speed. everything’s running under mod_perl with a new, more aggressive caching strategy. 2) the urls of pages should be a little nicer. instead of things like ‘node.pl?nid=4203’, ‘diary.pl?user=matti’, and ‘keyword.pl?keyword=fnord’ we now have ‘/nodes/4203’, ‘/users/matti/diary’, ‘/keyword/fnord’ and similar urls for most of the site. this is all through the magic of apache’s mod_rewrite module. and finally 3) bugs. there seem to be some problems with how i’ve configured the module i’m using to cache database connections and i’m seeing some sporadic errors. if you get a server error, try reloading the page a few times; usually that will do it. there are probably other errors too since it’s a fairly new and untested codebase. if you encounter problems that don’t go away with a couple quick reloads, let me know.
also, if you’re into tweaking your diary templates, you’ll need to take a good look at things to figure out the changes in the site organization. i’m going to run a script through the existing templates and hopefully get them all in line.
lani came up to hang out. she immediately decided that my apartment was intolerably cold and gave me a nice kick in the pants to actually do something about it. my apartment generally stays about 20 degrees warmer than it is outside. so when it’s 10 degrees outside, it is still rather chilly inside. i’d pretty much gotten used to it though and just spend most of my time wearing sweaters and hiding under blankets.
lani assessed the situation and decided that my main problem was drafty windows. for some reason, i have a lot of windows. (in my bedroom i have 3 30” x 84” windows.) they all face right into brick walls so they don’t provide any kind of light or view; they just make my apartment drafty. so we went to the hardware store and got a bunch of weather stripping and some of those shrink wrap kits. then we spent the rest of the night balancing precariously fighting with giant sheets of plastic and double sided tape.
sure enough, when we looked closely, we discovered that two of my windows were actually open a crack way up at the top. another one in my bedroom didn’t have so much of “draft” as a “breeze” coming in. it was almost impossible to get the plastic up because it kept billowing out from the air currents. in the end though, nature was no match for large quantities of duct tape.
now with almost all the windows in my apartment sealed off, the difference is astounding. my lips and fingertips aren’t even blue anymore!
in between our home improving, we also managed to go out for vegan food, watch Eddie Izzard: Dressed to Kill, and <a href=”http://us.imdb.com/Title?0087909”>Phenomena</a>, which was a pretty cool old horror movie that didn’t really make too much sense but was visually very interesting.
earlier this evening, after lani left, i also managed to meet up with <a href=”http://www.miromi.org/“>mimi</a> for a brief spell while she’s back visiting.
we met at a cafe down on St. Marks and had some beers and talked. mostly about programming stuff and the state of the tech economy.
we had some bonus entertainment when Laura stopped mid sentence, froze and turned white as a sheet. then the rest of us followed her gaze to a nice big cockroach climbing the wall right next to tilly. Avi handled the extermination with a napkin and a blunt object. we were pretty unphased, but our waitress was mortified. this brought up the subject of geckos (apparently letting a gecko loose in your apartment is a very efficient way of reducing the insect population) and their <a href=”http://polypedal.berkeley.edu/Profs_office/Full/Publications/publication_reprint_PDFs/63_evidofvanderwaals2.pdf”>feet</a>.
i have a better understanding of where that phrase came from and what it really means.
since about thursday, there’s been some kind of rodent trapped in the wall in my apartment. from the amount of noise it creates, i’d guess it’s a rat. naturally, the wall it’s gotten itself trapped in is the one that my bed’s headboard is up against. thursday night, i was kept awake all night with a constant barrage of scratching, pitter-pattering, and squeaking coming from the wall inches from my head. friday night and last night, the noise was still there but getting much less frequent. tonight, i’m still hearing the occasional scratch but very infrequently.
i wish there were something i could do to get it out of the wall. it’s not my idea of a fun time being kept awake at night thinking about some animal that’s trapped in a small, dark place, slowly starving to death.
it’ll probably stop making noise in the next day or two. then i get to hope that whatever material my walls are made out of (probably drywall or sheetrock; pretty hard stuff: it’s difficult to drive tacks into) contains odors well.
i’ve been getting really interested in math again lately and i must say that <a href=”http://www.doverpublications.com/“>Dover Books</a> have been a godsend. if you go to the Mathematics section of a bookstore and start looking at prices, you’ll notice that most books on math are <em>really</em> expensive. but the Dover books mostly seem to hover around $10-12. they tend to be older but still are often of decent quality. when you <em>think</em> you might be interested in tensor analysis but aren’t really sure, spending $10 on a Dover book is a reasonable investment.
on a related note, does anyone have a good introductory calculus book they recommend? i can <em>do</em> most calculus that comes my way but i haven’t actually <em>studied</em> calculus for 5 or 6 years and i’d like to brush up and fill in the gaps in my memory. i have a bunch of books on vector calculus and differential equations left over from my college classes but i did all my intro calculus in high school and they take the books back at the end of the year.
in attendance this year: jere, raim, myself, nigel, teri, nigel’s little brother sasha, matti, jesse, anthony, heather, tasha, and emile.
some highlights:
presenting jere with the eMac that we'd all chipped in to get her.
emile brought his homemade didgeridoos and showed us how to play them.
tasha cooked nature burgers and some fantastic indian stuff.
after running entirely out of alcohol, heather, tasha, and i drive all over massachusets at 1am looking for beer only to discover that it's illegal to sell alcohol in mass. after 11pm.
then we get back and discover 4 beers, 2 bottles of wine and 3 bottles of champagne hidden away in the fridge and the cellar.
things were down here for a while. they had to do some electrical work in our office so they shut the power down. then, when the power came back, one of the IDE drives in the server decided it was time to breathe its last breath. luckily, it was just a drive that we use to do backups; the root filesystem was fine. but, fsck wouldn’t get past that point in the boot sequence. normally this would take me 5 minutes to fix. but… it’s a little more difficult to debug and fix a hardware problem from a few hundred miles away.
thank god we’re moving to the new server with RAID drives soon.