% puts “stuff goes herr”^[[D^[[D^[[D^[[A^[[C^[[B^[[D <- (typo, right arrow, right arrow, RAAAGE)

The solution? rlfe: the read line front-end processor. It’s got a few bugs, but it works great for things like telnet and tclsh that by default don’t have line history and arrow key navigation.

$ sudo apt-get install rlfe
$ rlfe tclsh

Replace tclsh with practically any command line tool and get back to typing without fear of typos. Plus, you don’t have to keep retyping/copy pasting things when you want to run them again. The rlfe process will stick around after you close the application, so you really only need to run it once with rlfe.

Learn to program before college

I learned HTML/CSS when I was 12, was using Linux by 15, and knew enough about security to hack into my school’s webserver by 16. I took up programming at maybe 17 by teaching myself Python from online tutorials (which I’ve entirely forgotten the syntax of, but many things are universal in programming languages). Am I an unusual ubergeek? Well, yes and no. The fact is that if you enter CSE101 not knowing how to program, you’ll probably be in the minority. Does this mean that you’re behind and won’t be able to do well in CS? Certainly not. But this does mean you don’t know,

• If you’re going to like programming
• If you’re going to do well at programming
• If you’ll enjoy sitting at computers for hours learning stuff or go stark raving mad
• If you’ll be frustrated  not knowing what you’re doing or just accept it and keep searching for the answers
• If you’ve accepted the fact that you’re going to be a geek in every sense of the word (or at the very least, be surrounded by them)
• If you can handle spending 30 minutes writing a program and 3 hours debugging it

Learning the IT stuff

Now that you’re hopefully convinced you should be getting a head start on CS stuff, how do you do it? Having a solid foundation of computer skills is essential, and something they won’t teach you in college. Go get yourself an old computer from a swapmeet or online and install Linux. Never seen hard drive jumpers or power supply connectors before? Crack that baby open and see what’s inside. Then, install Linux. The reason is not because Linux is better than Windows, it’s because Linux is more transparent and actually more difficult to use. It’ll fail to install correctly, and in the process you might figure out what a bootloader is. You’ll pick up some terms about make tools and shared libraries when you install solitaire. You’ll pick up new concepts like dependency hell and kernel panic. It will be a love hate relationship and the process may lead to shark attacks.

You could call Linux a sort of bootcamp for computer people. When I started, everything that could go wrong went wrong with it. I once by accident destroyed my windows partition. I found that my video drivers were buggy as hell, my wifi cards needed custom firmware loaded into them, and that trying to get sound to work in Linux is less fun than herding mutant cat mules. I once managed to destroy X because it was a package dependency for a Firefox upgrade and the AMD64 bit version was unstable (or incompatible with something, I never found out for sure since that was the day I gave up using Gentoo). I once spent 3 hours trying to track down and manually compile all of the dependencies for a side scrolling open source game that only provided 30 minutes of entertainment actually playing. My SSH log in was always being harassed by strange Chinese IP addresses and the server was screwed up once from SQL injections on something I wrote.

The point is: when things are working fine in Windows all day, you don’t learn anything. Linux is actually becoming easier to use than ever with distributions like Ubuntu: don’t be afraid to jump into the more “advanced” distributions. I suggest Slackware as a good middle ground between working out of the box and being a good learning experience, then pick up something like Gentoo. Remember: pain is weakness leaving the body. Sometimes the old people complaining you kids have it too easy are actually right. When I was a kid, I remember having to wander the filesystem in a MSDOS command prompt… now get off my lawn (I’m a college graduate, I have the right to say that now, right?)!

Back to the details. What do you do with Linux now that it’s working?

• Learn to use the command line (+1 for learning shell scripting)
• Learn Vim (+1 if you become a vim junky and install vim shortcut emulation plugins in your browser)
• Get SSH working
• Get a webserver working (http, ftp)
• Did you pick up HTML yet? Go host your own webpage
• Get Samba working
• Play with cron jobs for doing backups and maintenance
• Try different GUIs (KDE, Gnome, xfce, Fluxbox)
• Try to recompile your kernel, explore start up scripts, and make it boot as fast as possible
• Look up guides on how to keep it secure and maybe play with some offensive security (hacking) network tools on your own network

Learning the programming stuff

Alright, you’ve either gotten the basics of computer stuff down or skipped it since you want to get straight to programming that video game idea you’ve been dreaming about. Either way I would recommend that your first programming language is something high level with a decent GUI library built in. Personally I went with Python/Tk followed by TCL/Tk. Other options could be Ruby or PHP if you can find decent tutorials on the internet for them. The reason for not jumping straight into C/C++/Java is that a scripting language will probably let you get to fun stuff sooner. Using Tk you can throw together a little tick tack toe game in about 5 minutes once you know what you’re doing. The second advantage is that this will reduce you’re boredom in beginning CS classes where they will probably start with either Java or C++. The third advantage is that a scripting language is always useful as a go to language for a quick script to do something like text processing. Learn regular expressions, they’re useful even for everyday find/replace tasks on a decent text editor.

How to learn to program

Learning to program is a bit like learning a musical instrument. People can tell you how to do it 500 times and it won’t make you any better. You simply become a better programmer by programming. When you’re learning to use Linux, it generally screws up and you figure out how to fix it. When you move on to programming, you screw up and slowly learn from your mistakes until you see what to do and what not to. Some things might accelerate the learning path: seeing really good code, seeing really bad code, finding the built in library that does the exact thing you’ve spent 3 days programming from scratch, sitting through lectures on software design and algorithms. Overall the best way to learn to program IS to program. I absolutely can not stand reading tutorials on the syntax of languages. Learn the basics of a language and then move on to actually trying to program something. What you ask? What do people draw when they learn to paint? What do people play when they learn music? What kind of building does an architect practice design on? There’s no correct answer; be creative. If you can’t think of anything useful to make, you can always resort to classic games (tic tack toe, checkers, chess, blackack, rubik’s cube, tower defense game, etc etc). The point being it’s easier to study pages of dull documentation when you’re using that to work toward a working program rather than just trying to memorize stuff. Your program might have been programmed a hundred times before, but that won’t make it any less of an experience writing, and you could learn from other people’s implementations.

Keeping the passion and motivation

Everyone has highs and lows when it comes to interests in things. If you’ve been reading from the beginning of this you probably think that I sit around every night writing MMORPGs and hacking together Linux scripts that make my Linux box take input by voice command. The truth is that  my work ethic can best be summarized as spurts of obsessive genius followed by long stretches of laziness, and the vast majority of my nights are filled catching up on all the TV I somehow missed growing up (seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer? If not, go, watch, now). This occurs on both a daily and long term basis, and I don’t believe I’m alone in it. Something I saw in a post by Joel Spolsky resonated with me,

Sometimes I just can’t get anything done.

Sure, I come into the office, putter around, check my email every ten seconds, read the web, even do a few brainless tasks like paying the American Express bill. But getting back into the flow of writing code just doesn’t happen. These bouts of unproductiveness usually last for a day or two. But there have been times in my career as a developer when I went for weeks at a time without being able to get anything done. As they say, I’m not in flow. I’m not in the zone. I’m not anywhere.

…

For me, just getting started is the only hard thing. An object at rest tends to remain at rest. There’s something incredible heavy in my brain that is extremely hard to get up to speed, but once it’s rolling at full speed, it takes no effort to keep it going.

This is the same with me. Once you get in the middle of a programming project it isn’t a chore, it’s a rush, a feeling of zen that most people rarely find during their day job. However, finding the motivation to get started, especially without school or work deadlines pushing you can be the last thing you feel like doing. I don’t have any solution to this other than: think of something to program and force yourself to start. Sure, it might end up being a false start, I once tried to force myself into the mood by programming an Android time tracking application for people with type A personalities (or just plain OCD, doubt I would ever actually be able to consistently use such and application). It ended in nothing but a failed attempt to find the Ballmer Peak and a slightly more advanced version of the classic Hello World program to see if my SDK was set up.

You might find motivation in odd places too. Why did I take up exploring network security? Anger at someone who told me their page was secure after I said it was outdated and full of holes. I once programmed a puzzle solving game automation program to impress a girl (she was impressed, but in hindsight asking her out would have been a far more effective move). The IRC bot I wrote was partly inspired by another guy writing a bot and battling mine with massive kick/ban/flood wars until the IRC network banned both our IP addresses.  Good times. What you should take away from this is that programming game playing algorithms is not a good way to attract a girl.

If you manage to make it through college as a CS major without having at least one existential crisis, I’ll be amazed. At some point you’ll probably be sitting gloomily in front of your computer realizing that the last x years of your life have been focused around the perusal of degree which will enable you to spend 10x that number of years sitting in front of computers pressing buttons and making the patterns on the screen change. In fact, this was the hardest thing about college for me. It wasn’t the work, I could do the work easily if I applied myself. It was just trying to not fall into apathy, or worse, pure hate for school (keep reading and I’ll got to this).

How did I survive it without becoming a deranged alcoholic? It’s surprising how many software developers and IT people you can find in hole in the wall bars; you should be concerned I know this. There is no easy answer to this. My only advice is to find something to do, even if it isn’t programming. The worse period of my college experience was about 6-12 months ago when I simply had no motivation to touch any CS stuff outside of work and school. The classes I had were both boring and tedium filled, the capstone project I was looking forward to ended up being a huge wast of time, and I’d been both in school and at my internship long enough that absolutely nothing new or exciting was happening in my life. I managed to narrowly avoid failing Statistics for Engineers (pulled a C out of it from 2 days of cramming for the final). The only thing that pulled me out of it was the reality that this is my last semester and I really need to start doing things like planning for a career and not failing my last upper division humanity.

Thoughts on bad professors

An unfortunate fact of my college experience is that I would say the bad professors outnumbered the good professors by probably 2 to 1. For every lecture I went to, I had 2 others with a professor I found mediocre at best.  Is this conclusion because my expectations for professors are too high? Maybe: what makes a good professor?

• Knowledge of the subject matter above and beyond the textbooks
• Can be understood (doesn’t skip too many steps, can speak English, can explain things articulately, can write legibly)
• Entertaining personality/ability to hold people’s attention (throwing in a joke or story instead of 75 minutes of straight monotone slide reading)
• Fair grading scheme and tests

Graduating on time

College advisers always push graduating on time. I went the route of attempting a double major (in math), giving that up, and ended up being behind 1/2 to 1 year depending on how you count things. I don’t regret it at all, if you’re liking college, don’t be afraid to kill some time with interesting non-required classes. It’s easy to get internships when you’re in college that look good on a resume, and in the big scheme of things, who cares if you’re a year older when you enter the work force?

Exception: if you’re hating every moment of college, try and get out quick and not procrastinate. I put off a few classes I didn’t want to take and I would have done better on them earlier on before I lost a lot of my motivation. For those in pain, the quick bandage approach is far better than the slow procrastinating but loathing perma-college student that takes 8 years to finish their degree (I’ve seen it). But hey, 8 years if you’re having the time of your life might be okay, just depends on your situation.

Final thoughts and a link

Somewhere in the middle of college I stumbled across Joel Spolsky’s blog, Joel on Software; I highly recommend reading through his old posts. One of his posts offers some advice for computer science majors.  Go read it yourself, but here are his main points.

• Learn how to write before graduating.

• Learn C before graduating.

• Learn microeconomics before graduating.

• Don’t blow off non-CS classes just because they’re boring.

• Take programming-intensive courses.

• Stop worrying about all the jobs going to India.

• No matter what you do, get a good summer internship.

Despite getting a ton of reading done, when I got busy with school and work the buses would be an endless source of frustration and near rage for me. I was wasting 2 hours a day, sometimes more if I’d miss buses or they’d end up late. Eventually when I had enough money saved up, this resulted in my moving closer to campus and buying a car. Did this make me more efficient? No, not really. Instead of waking up at 7:30am to make it somewhere by 9:00am, I’m likely to wake up at 8:30am and get some extra sleep. I didn’t magically gain 2 hours of time, and even if I did I probably waste those 2 hours most of the time doing something less productive than exercising or reading a good book. I actually miss how much reading I used to get done, because now, it ironically feels like I don’t have time to read a lot of the time (plus it’s hard to just get the motivation).

The moral of the story is, trying to become fixed to schedules and saving time in your life may have more consequences than you would think. The time spent taking a bus, getting groceries, or even watching TV might provide benefits besides the obvious. I actually sleep better when I watch TV for a while before going to bed. Otherwise my mind ends up racing and thinking about the day rather than calming down and going to sleep; and most of the thoughts are just repetitive and useless since you’re not getting any new input to that internal state machine laying in bed staring at the ceiling. Something that seems like a complete waste of time might be something you miss after you quit doing it, and for good reason.

Overall progress for the first 70 days,

How long does it take to become proficient in DVORAK?

In my case: 3-4 months to get back to my old QWERTY level of 80-90WPM. I still hope to surpass 100WPM average, something I never did in QWERTY, but I’m not really concerned about it anymore or actively striving to reach it. In fact, keyboard layouts rarely cross my mind lately, the only reason I’m writing this post is because it’s had a half finished version in my drafts for a month. I’ve also been thinking about finishing up a typing program I hacked together, but that’ll be another post.

How did you get passed the 60 WPM barrier?

I’ve seen several posts on forums of people complaining of being stuck at 60WPM for weeks or moths (or in some cases, forever). I’m not sure what it is about that speed that causes such a learning barrier, but I was stuck there for quite a while as well. A lot of people say working on accuracy is the key, but I found that it didn’t make much difference and made typing more frustrating since I was always trying to monitor myself for making mistakes. If I had to make a guess about why this barrier exists, I would have to say that it’s because of weak keys messing up your typing rhyme. At this point there are no letters that slow down my typing, but back when I was stuck at 60WPM I remember some keys were always a lot slower to type. My advice if you’re stuck at 60WPM: focus on any keys that you hesitate on. Also, expect progress to slow down. When you start off learning you’ll be gaining 5 WPM in a day, but once you get passed the 60 WPM barrier it’s a slow logarithmic curve.

Do you still practice typing just for the sake of typing?

No. I spend a few minutes on keybr.com and typeracer every few days in order to track my progress and because, for whatever reason, I actually find it sort of fun. It’s like a video game, you try and surpass your old high score with concentration and skill. But I haven’t actively practiced typing for long periods of time since September. Once practicing typing gets boring, in my opinion you should give it up and go type stuff instead. Chat with your friends on IM, chat with strangers, write a blog, write a story, write a book, write a program, write reviews on movies and restaurants, write a wiki entry about the t-shirts worn by your favorite character in the last episode of a TV show, write posts on forums. There’s plenty of stuff to write about; don’t waste too much time repeating gibberish from Mavis Beacon.

Can you still use QWERTY?

As proficiently as before? No. I can still surpass 60WPM on QWERTY, but I also have a habit of looking at the keyboard again. Unlike DVORAK, when you’re forced to use someone else’s computer, you can just glance down at the keys when you forget where the single quote or underline character is. This concerned me quite a bit when I wast first starting to learn, but after I got good at DVORAK I quit caring. 95% of your typing is going to be on a computer you either own or work at all day and have the ability to customize any way you want. I should probably have a QWERTY weekend once a month to ensure that I don’t completely forget the muscle memory, but I’m not really concerned about it. If you really need to use QWERTY a lot, you’ll be able to type fine in both layouts. It’s the human desktop cleanup wizard: you remember what’s important and forget what you don’t use or think about. It just depends on how important QWERTY is to you. Not switching to DVORAK because you’re afraid you’ll suck at QWERTY is like not wanting to switch to Linux or Mac because you’re afraid you’ll suck at Windows. You’ll be fine, and even if you do suck at Windows, take pride in the fact you’re skilled in something that’s a superior version.

Do you still use QWERTY?

Not when I don’t have to. Cases I still use QWERTY,

Shared computers at work that I’m not using for a long period of time (otherwise I’ll switch it to DVORAK and then back to QWERTY when logging out). Remote Desktop will automatically set the layout on the remote computer when you log in, but not if the computer is already logged in and you’re just switching back to the session.

Gaming. Still need the good old ASDW keys for control.

Phone keyboards. I could probably find a DVORAK setting for Android, but I prefer to just stick with the onscreen QWERTY.

Random Stuff

Here are some logs from keybr.com,

9-15-11 to 10-02-11,

10-01-11 to 10-16-11,

10-23-11 to 11-26-11,

Also some videos of typing,

http://youtu.be/hxsmW9OWVFQ

http://youtu.be/MEpfAvA-wOo

• Backups. If the hard drive in my old HP died today, I’d loose gigabytes of pictures, music, code, and random writings. I could throw a second drive in it, but then you still risk having the drive die as it’s getting just as much on-time as the other one.

• Noise. There are currently 3 full size desktops running on my desk (regular use desktop, the HP server, and a friend’s desktop that acts as off sight storage for him). Most of the time, fan noise doesn’t bother me. it in fact helps me sleep easier. You know you’ve been around computers too much when the gentle blowing of computer fans and occasional hard drive clicks lulls you to sleep like those sound of nature noise CDs they sell on late night TV commercials. There are still occasions when I prefer a bit of silence though.

• Heat. At one point, I was running 4 monitors (2 of which CRT) in addition to the three desktops previously mentioned, plus a router and piles of chargers and other electronic devices. With everything on, I could literally feel the temperature change walking into my room (probably 2-5 degrees). Piles of servers are great to play with, but unless you have a dedicated server room, cooling becomes an issue sooner than you may think.

MiniITX form factors make a great size for a cheap and small computer. Specifications for my new file server,

• Rosewill RC-CIX-01 Mini-ITX Case with 150W Power Supply
• Intel BOXD525MW Intel Atom D525@ 1.8GHz CPU/Mobo
• 2x Crucial 2GB 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500)
• 2x Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EARS 1TB 5400RPM 3.5″
• SNT-125B 3.5″ SATA Hard drive to 5.25″ Bay

The downside of this build: I hate the case. Despite having decent reviews, it was just one thing after another when putting it together. First, there are 4 plastic snaps that hold the front panel on. The very first time I tried to remove it they were so brittle that one of them broke off. Not a huge deal, still stays on fine, but if you do have the misfortune of getting this case, be careful with the plastic snaps. The second fail was when I tried to install my 5.25″ to 3.5″ hard drive bay for the second hard drive. I vastly prefer cases that have the drive bays extended to the front of the case, and instead this case has about a 1″ gap with a hole for the CD to come out. I removed the flap and CD extender button, but the hole is about 1cm too small to fully remove my external drive. I’ve considered cutting a slice out of it, but I haven’t gotten the courage to mangle it up yet. It’ll be hard to make it look decent after that. Finally, when I got everything installed and powered it up, I found that despite being a small 150 Watt power supply, the thing is loud. The 80mm fan isn’t terribly quiet either, and the case has no sound proofing whatsoever. The power supply also generates a decent amount of heat for the size. I’m considering replacing both the PSU and the fan, but for now I’ll live with it. Basically: don’t get this case. Spend the extra $50 and find one that’s quiet and has a more efficient power supply, the total cost will still be below $300.

For software I put Xubuntu on it, though I’m considering swapping it out for something else. No hardware problems though, everything worked fine after install. I’ll post some updates on software later.

Build pictures

The one issue that bothers me the most with the Kindle is the inability to quickly and easily determine book sizes when shopping on Amazon. When you go to a bookstore and hold the physical book in your hand, you instantly get a rough idea of the size. I’ve read 1,000 page paperbacks and I’ve read 150 page paperbacks; when I’m purchasing a book I’d like to know what category it falls into. Unfortunately, the page is a terrible unit of book size measurement. If you change the font, line spacing, or word spacing on your Kindle, the number of ‘pages’ in the book will reflect the new settings, so page numbers become fairly meaningless. Some Kindle books do show a fixed page count when you bring up the menu, but that’s only after the book has been purchased and downloaded to the Kindle. In order to tell the length of a book, you need to resort to looking up the paperback version and seeing how many pages it is (and hoping it’s a standard sized paperback). The best solution would be to start posting book sizes in something like word counts, and letting the Kindle users slowly adjust their sense of size accordingly.

Another minor grievance I have is with the social networking feature of the Kindle. You can highlight a section of a book and post it as a quote to Facebook or Twitter. However, if you save that quotation to your Kindle quotations and post it from that part of the Kindle, it doesn’t reference the book in the social media quote, but instead just says it came from “my content” or something like that. You can always jump to the location in the book where the quotation was taken and then quote it on social media, but it’s just annoying you can’t make it quote correctly from your saved content.

Overall though, the Kindle is still working great.

Background

First off, for background information, my QWERTY typing skills are an odd mix that induce both cringes and amazement from people seeing me type at my best. I average around 80 WPM on QWERTY, but the catch is, I do that with mostly two fingers and a lot of hand motion. I never look or think about the keyboard in QWERTY, but I never mastered the correct touch typing technique. For common letter combinations I use multiple fingers, or for some of the letters near the side of the keyboard (like ‘a’ and ‘z’). However, I realized that using this typing method I’m limited directly by my physical hand movement speed. When typing and pushing 100WPM my hands are moving all over the keyboard at a rate too fast to keep up for long periods of time, even though my mind is quite capable of realizing where the keys I want are faster than that. I also am all too aware that hand problems are very too common for someone like myself who spends all day at a computer; learning proper touch typing might avoid problems in the future (carpel tunnel seems to run in my family).

Once committed to the idea of forcing myself into using proper touch typing technique, I decided that I might as well go extreme and learn a more efficient keyboard layout at the same time. If I had the chance to do this again, I may have considered COLEMAK instead of DVORAK, and I recommend looking into both if you’re just considering learning a new layout (but only commit to learning one). However,  DVORAK became my default choice since at the time I didn’t know COLEMAK existed. For those that don’t know, DVORAK is a keyboard layout based on putting common keys on the home row, vowels on one hand, and encouraging hand alteration. The world record typist Barbara Blackburn used the DVORAK layout. It uses far less hand and finger motion that QWERTY, but the ability to increase typing speed with this layout seems to depend on the individual.

How to learn a new layout?

On to the actual learning! There are two major schools of thought when learning a new keyboard layout:  the full time alternate layout group and the alternate layout by night crowd. The first group insists that after an initial few days of learning, you should switch cold turkey and only use DVORAK. This means no touching QWERTY at all, since they believe that even using it for a short time will confuse your new muscle memory and keep you from improving quickly. This method is very painful for the first few weeks, but your improvement will be much quicker. Another risk of this method is losing the ability to type in QWERTY. Not typing for a few months will ruin your typing speed to begin with; typing only in a new layout for months will make it even easier for your old skills to degrade while your new ones slowly grow.

The second school of thought is for the more pragmatic individuals. Staying a QWERTY user for some things (such as work) while working on developing your DVORAK skills by day allows you to not sacrifice productivity during the day and still retain your old QWERTY ability. Taking 10 minutes to type an email that previously took you 1 minute may not go over well at your work in the first couple weeks of your learning period. The downside is that your DVORAK improvement will be much slower, and according to some critics, may peak and never allow you to surpass your old typing speed in the new layout. I went with this learning method due to the inability to sacrifice my productivity much in the first few weeks; I’ve come to believe that it has both pros and cons, but works best for me. You can always combine both methods by starting out practicing DVORAK only in low stress environments until you get to a comfortable speed before switching over full time.

From my experience, learning DVORAK can be divided into 3 phases. Phase 1 is the initial learning of the layout, phase 2 is building muscle memory and letting typing require less thought, and phase 3 is building speed. I’ll describe my experiences at each phase of development.

Phase 1: Learning the Layout

Phase 1 is by many considered the most painful phase of learning, and I’m afraid I would probably have to agree. In this phase, you start out knowing nothing and must slowly learn the keyboard locations one letter at a time. I spent about a week in this phase,  I would learn one row of letters a day and then it took another few days of practice before I could reliably find letters, albeit very very slowly. My advice for this phase is to focus on learning a few letters at a time, and then just lots of practice until you can reach 10-20wpm. The best way I can describe this phase is feeling like a stroke victim. You’ll know what letter you want to type, know that in QWERTY it would be second nature, but now it takes you literally seconds to recall where it is and command your fingers to move there in a painfully deliberate act. It’s like learning to walk all over again, or, well, type. For the first few days try printing out a DVORAK chart and having it near the keyboard, but don’t bother trying to rearrange keys on the keyboard, it won’t make this stage any less painful and it’s better to start off avoiding the habit to look at the keyboard. During this phase, don’t pay attention to speed, it will frankly be discouraging. Just focus on accuracy and practice a few hours a day.

Phase 2: Learning to type what you think rather than think about how to type

Phase 2 will be somewhat painful as well, but the worst is over and the transition mark is clear. At this point, you know were any key is, even if the recall speed is slow. Sometimes you’ll hit the wrong key, especially when trying to type faster, but your accuracy will increase along with your raw speed. This might actually be the funnest part of the learning process, because the slope of your learning curve will be at it’s maximum (yes, I did just make a derivative reference, woo calculus!). To give you and idea of the improvement possible within this phase, here are my first results from practice on www.keybr.com. Note that this page uses all lowercase and no punctuation, and additionally has a lot of repeats of common diagraghs and trigraghs. I enjoyed practicing on it, but the word per minute rates are skewed a decent amount higher than typing normal text.

Phase 2 is also where you will most notice the odd aspects of typing and your brain if you were already a high speed typer (60wpm+). I’ll point a few things out I found interesting, and which really gave me some insight on slow typers and the things they struggle with.

I can’t think about typing it QWERTY and type well. I just do it; I don’t know where the ‘b’ key is, I just type brown and bat without a moment’s thought to key locations. If I try to think about where the ‘b’ key is, my typing actually gets slower and I may actually get it wrong. In DVORAK phase 2, you’ll be thinking about where each letter is, and it will actually make thinking about what you’re typing more difficult. This is the reason I still used QWERTY at work a lot during this stage. The raw speed on a typing test was fine, but it took a lot of thought to type and made it harder to focus on what I was typing rather than the process itself. People who hate typing often do this, they feel that they can’t both think and type at the same time, while other people can do it as naturally as writing or speaking, almost using it as a beneficial aid in their though process.

I also think phonetically while typing in many cases. Some people get bogged down spelling words, while I tend to type as if I’m transcribing my current thoughts to text as I think them. I don’t give the least bit of thought to most spellings, and I can be a terrible speller because of it. On the plus side, I can do things like stream of couscous this entire blog post in no time at all. When you’re in phase 2 of DVORAK, you’ll be thinking in letters more than sounds or words, and in fact overcoming this barrier is one of the primary things that define the transition from phase 2 to phase 3.

In summary, the transition to what I call phase 3 requires the following,

• The ability to type without thinking about how to type (your fingers just find the keys)
• The ability to type words without thinking on a letter by letter basis, but rather phonetically sounding things out as you type or just knowing the spelling and being able to reproduce the word without much thought.
• A slow in learning. Phase 2 you can rapidly improve as you approach phase 3, but once the techniques are mastered progress will slow down.

Was it worth learning?

This question must be evaluated several different ways. My original goal was to increase typing speed, but I’ve since mostly abandoned that. It’s quite possible that it will happen at some point, but I’ve come to realize it isn’t that important compared to things like being able to think about other things while typing (like what you want to type). DVORAK still feels a bit awkward and it’s very easy for me to just arbitrarily decide to use QWERTY all day. However, DVORAK does cause less hand strain and tiredness than QWERTY with most of the common letters being on the home row.

Overall, I enjoyed the little learning experiment and became a lot more familiar with different facets of typing and how we learn to do things subconsciousnessly. I’ve found the process fascinating and even wrote a program to log and analyze my typing to discover weak keys and typing trends. A person’s typing is so unique that several commercial programs use it for a biometric identification system on top of standard username and password login forms. The journey has been an enjoyable exercise, but the end result is probably not spectacular enough to warrant the switch if you just want to increase typing speed.

Eventually I’ll get around to posting an update here if I surpass my QWERTY speed with DVORAK, and my opinion might sway a little more toward the switching being worth.

GScreen’s dual screen SpaceBook

Dual monitors are awesome; it’s amazing I get anything done on a single monitor with all the window switching I have to do. I even tried quad monitors for a while, though in the end I gave that up and went back to two. But dual monitors on a laptop? GScreen does just this with a new portable workstation known as the SpaceBook, touting two 1920×1080 17″ LCDs that fold out from the middle of the 10 pound beast. Overkill or awesome? For the price, I would say overkill. The hardware specifications aren’t very impressive and the price definitely has a novelty fee thrown on top ($2,395? Really?). For the price of the new SpaceBook, you could buy a couple of 17″ LCDs and run three monitors with the laptop in the middle with Eyefinity. Not as portable (what, you don’t want to carry around a laptop bag the size of your grandma’s suitcase?), but when you’re talking about a 10 pound laptop with a 2 hour battery, you threw portable off the requirements sheet a long time ago and are really looking for a desktop equivalent that you can carry around when you travel.

Another thing that would concern me is the touchpad. Regular touchpads are just barely tolerable to begin with, imagine having to scroll from one screen to another all the time. With a mostly square touchpad like the one provided, that means you’ll be scrolling horizontally a lot more than vertically, and it’s going to be difficult to get the sensitivity set to a decent level.

LED Hat

Looking like something out of a 70′s alien movie: I’d wear it. Maybe not in public… but somewhere.

NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft Orbits Vesta

Orbiting an asteroid isn’t an easy thing, the gravity produced by them barely makes them round. The Dawn satellite, launched back in 2007, has finally placed itself in orbit around an asteroid and started returning back pictures. It’s always good to see something new happen in space technology, even if it’s a small step.

It’s turning out to be a decent amount of work (and I’ve barely started…). Since moving out from my parent’s place, my tool box and pile of junk parts shrunk to almost nothing, either since I left stuff behind or it was my parent’s to begin with. It’s the little things that kill you… audio cables, coax, connectors, adapters, drills, power poles… Basic plan is as follows.

Step 1: get a working HF radio going. I’ve got an Elecraft K2 that’s been collecting dust since Field Day about 5 years ago when, at around 3:00am, the receiver seemed to be experiencing deaf spots on 40 meters (or was it 20…). We swapped it out for another radio and I never got around to figuring out what happened to it. It’s possible that the front end got damaged from the other Field Day transmitter on a nearby frequency overloading it. It’s also possible the coils on the torroids just got jostled around on the trip and during setup, meaning it may just need to be retuned. There’s also a slight possibility nothing’s wrong with it at all and I just thought there was, so let it collect dust for half a decade not wanting to figure out how to fix it.

Step 1.1: build an HF white noise generator in order to test the receiver sensitivity across the band and to retune the filters. Couple of trips to Radio Shack and a few hours soldering, I managed to get this little gadget together. It sucks at high frequencies (anything above 40 meters), probably because I’m using a Zener diode with a little lower voltage than they said. I tried fiddling with the value of R1, but it didn’t seem to help enough to make it worth trying to unsolder the 1.8k I had on there.

I decided since I was going to all the effort of building it, I might as well stick it in an enclosure so it doesn’t get destroyed like most of my tiny perf board projects inevitably do if they get thrown in a box somewhere. I ran into a dead end when I was trying to figure out how to mount the PL259 connector when I don’t own a drill, a saw, or much of anything to cut through the plastic enclosure in the shape of a 9/16″ circle. Finishing it up will have to wait for a Tuesday when I can borrow some tools from someone to drill out the holes for the case.

I’m also retrieving the K2 from my parent’s house Tuesday (or sooner if I get antsy on Sunday). I’m really hoping that it’ll just work, or perhaps it just needs to have a hard reset and the filters retuned. Otherwise I’ll have to dig out some more junk and try to inject some signals that I can do signal tracing on and hopefully identify the cause of failure… that could quickly turn into putting a dead end to this plan and sticking the K2 back in a closet for another half a decade if it’s going to cost a lot to fix.

Backup plan, I’ve got a Yaesu 767gx also collecting dust. The thing is massive and I have no idea where I’d put it, the K2 is certainly easier to stick somewhere and use. Maybe I’ll drag both of them from my parent’s house to my apartment so I have a backup radio and something I can use to test the other with.

Step 2: Shopping for the odds and ends…

There’s a hamfest coming up in a little over a week, I’m hoping I can gather together all the little things I seem to be missing.

• Coax (25 foot section, some short sections)
• Red/Black heavy gauge wire
• Power Pole power connectors
• A dipole balun (or entire dipole, or other antenna I could hide near my apartment)
• Alligator clips (always need them, never have them)
• An SWR/Power meter
• A decent pair of headphones (optional)

The bedroom window faces north, and happens to have a nice 8 foot block wall 15 feet behind the window (thick black line). Even better, there’s a large tree (green dot) right in front of the window, which will be great for concealing coax. The current plan is to throw either a 40 or 20 meter dipole up along the fence to at least get started again. Alternative/future plan includes trying to run an east/west dipole along the roof (no idea how I’d get up there, need a ladder), maybe a 20 meter east/west and a 40 meter in the back going north/south. I’ve got a few hundred feet of rope and copper wire, the only thing stopping me is the lack of coax and not having a balun, hopefully two things that will be remedied at the hamfest.

He completely disassembled someone’s car at a Starbucks, because it was parked across two spaces. He was fired from radio shack, for building a deathray and vaporizing a customer. He got order for an office chair on Ebay, and sent an angry bobcat instead. He was thrown out of Microsoft for trying to feed a squirrel through a fax machine. His future girlfriend stole his hat, he stole a nuclear submarine from the Russians to fetch it. He is the most interesting geek in the world… HAT GUY!

72: Classhole (Hat Guy is my hero, so I include most of the good ones with him doing crazy stuff)

123: Centrifugal Force (James Bond is no match for Hat Guy)

217: e to the pi minus pi (More hat guy pranks)

322: Pix Plz (Hat Guy may break every law in the book, but he’s got his code of morality)

325: A-Minus-Minus (“Ordered office chair, got bobcat”)

374: Journal (Beginning of an awesome Hat Guy story arc)

377: Journal 2 (Dun dun DUN)

405: Journal 3 (“You made one mistake. You took my hat. I LIKE my hat.”)

432: Journal 4 (Aw, Hat Guy’s got a crush)

433: Journal 5 (“Remote mines under your car.” “Oh, those? I moved them to your garage before knocking”)

494: Secretary Part 1 (The tubes are clogged!)

495: Sectary Part 2 (“What the hell kind of apartment has a mote?” Hat Guy’s, that’s what kind.)

496: Sectary Part 3 (“You were fired from radio shack after you built a deathray and vaporized a customer?” )

497: Sectary Part 4 (Included just for the sake of including the entire arc)

498: Sectary Part 5 (“Upon review of your qualifications… we’ve decided to sentence you to death”)

506: Theft of the Magi (They need better communication in this relationship)

515: No One Must Know (Smooth)

542: Cover-Up (Think fast)

562: Parking (Hat Guy has a pet peeve for double parkers)

611: Disaster Voyeurism (Hat Guy’s definitely got a bit of a dark side)

792: Password Reuse (I’m fairly sure that’s Google’s real business plan right there)

Programming and Linux references,

138: Pointers (Terrible terrible typing of the datatypes…)

148: Sandwich (Real programmers just use Sudo su)

156: Commented (Or there’s the dual hand four finger # sign)

163: Donald Knuth (Hat guy’s code would be interesting to read)

178: Not Really Into Pokemon (If someone said that to me, I would strangle them with an Ubuntu lanyard)

196: Command Line Fu (Linux works fine! Now excuse me while I go rewrite the DHCP client so it’ll actually work on ASU’s network)

208: Regular Expressions (Regexp. Nuff said.)

224: Lisp (I prefer TCL hacks, but yeah)

234: Escape Artist (Yep, that’s me when programming)

287: NP-Complete (I once had a friend say, “don’t let your geekyness make you feel awkward. Use it to make other people feel awkward instead.”)

292: GOTO (Kernel programmers must always be prepared for the raptors. See 87)

303: Compiling (It sadly doesn’t work for scripting languages)

323: Ballmer Peak (It’s very delicate to obtain…)

327: Exploits of a Mom (Always be weary of SQL injection)

349: Success (True story, totally happened when I tried to dual boot FreeBSD)

378: Real Programmers (Real programmers browse the web with Vi)

456: Cautionary (This happened to me when I was 16. I relapse every few years.)

519: 11th Grade (In my case, it was TCL)

554: Not Enough Work

664: Academia vs Business (the hover over text is awesome)

Random Categories,

55: Useless (So true…)

69: Pillow Talk (Neither is optimizing cube crash playing algorithms)

87: Velociraptors (Always be prepared! For velociraptor attacks.)

135: Substitute (Now this is my kind of word problem)

165: Turn Signals (Best. Pickup line. EVER!)

203: Hallucinations (I know, right?)

206: Reno Rhymes (Long live the browncoats!)

227: Color Codes (I think when people ask my what time it is, I’m going to start answering in resistor color codes)

228: Resonance (Office life)

243: Appropriate Term (Or pencil eraser references)

249: Chess Photo (Awesome because people have been doing this ever since the comic)

275: Thoughts (Mental filter fail)

281: Online Package Tracking (It makes you stark raving mad I tell you!)

309: Shopping Teams

320: 28-Hour Day (One of these days I’m going to try this for a full week)

335: Mattress (Engineering at it’s finest)

340: Fight (Burn! Also, this is why you back up your MBR)

341: 1337 Part 1 (You don’t mess with Mrs. Roberts)

Also, parts (2, 3, 4, and 5). (“Mom, I’m hungry!” “Shush I’m coding, you ate yesterday”)

413: New Pet (“I think my mothering instinct took a wrong turn somewhere…)

466: Moving  (It took over a week to get internet in my apartment! Luckily I cracked my neighbor’s WEP keys in a day)

476: One Sided (Been there, done that)

477: Typewriter

525: I Know You’re Listening (Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t listening)

530: I’m An Idiot (I love this one!)

531: Contingency Plan

557: Students (I’ve had this dream so many times…)

576: Packages (TODO: Write this script)

606: Cutting Edge (I did this with Half Life 2…)

612: Estimation (aah the days of Windows 95-2K..)

627: Tech Support Cheat Sheet (Being a CS major means family members expect you to know everything about computers, physics, and the latest political news)

643: Ohm (V=IR)

699: Trimester

705: Devotion to Duty

722: Computer Problems (The life of computer programmers)

763: Workaround (Oh so true…)

806: Tech Support (I at least have that daydream)

864: Flying Cars