Staticfree Blog

"Molten milk chocolate mixed with cream is like a liquid cuddle for your belly." -Steve *drooling at the thought*

Mink and Kris visited me over the weekend. They drove out from Boston sharing the joyous task of conducting Kris's boatSUV on the Route Ninety Sea. We had a most excellent time hanging out while Rob and Ryan worked on and drank their beer, cuddled, toured RIT and other such randomy things. I miss being in Boston and I miss them both; why must I be plagued with the torment of distance? So far I've had one (1) relationship (besides this summer) where distance was not a major impediment. Even then, transportation was a bit of a pain without a car. Some day, some glorious day...

On an unrelated note, I am now Vice President of RIT's SME club. Andrew has also been appointed the President. That means that the top two positions of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers are lead by ones other than Manufacturing Engineers. I'm not even technically an engineer either. I believe there's one ME student in the entire club, but I could be wrong.

Whatever the silly terminology makes itself out to being, I'm now co-leading what's solely become a robotics club (technically, SME does other things. I should probably find out what those are soon, I imagine). Together with MDRC, we will be trying to bring more robotics projects to RIT.

One of the most important aspects of robotics in a school environment is that it requires the help of many types of people to produce a final product. Hardware designers, hardware producers, software designers, software implementers, debuggers, web designers, graphic artists - a vast array of people can work together on one [hopefully] kick-ass tangible goal. This is why I like robotics: bringing together a heterogeneous group of people to make one nifty device. Well, that and the fact that I really enjoy automation in all its various forms. Especially 300lb forms that attempt to drive by themselves.

Now I must return to the homework I've been attempting to do all weekend (how can you sit down in front of a book writing in Japanese, «Mt. Everest is a bit larger than Mt. Fuji.» and other such variations for a few hours when there are two attractive females visiting you for a weekend? It's just unpossible). My partner in AI today greeted at lab me with a yellow Course Withdrawl form. He told me he was going to pull out and will be continuing to help with the project, but that's a good gauge of how frustrating the class is. Hopefully I can find time to sort out all the "fuzzy assignments" he keeps handing out; they're often about as vague as recycled technologies we explore.

My weekend consisted of the following chain of people and events:

Friday: home → RTS Bus → Greyhound → Worcester → Mink.

Saturday: Mink → breakfast with her friends → hang out with her suitemates → Commuter Rail → Lisa → Kris → Eat, Drink, Man, Woman.

Sunday: Kris → Harvard Square → Tashari & Pete → One Arrow St. Crepes → Newbury St. → Allyson & friends → Trident Cafe → Delerium concert at Axis → dad's appt.

Monday: Dad → Greyhound → RTS Bus → home → bike to RIT for classes → Rob → home where Ryan and Rob tried their homebrewed beer for the first time.

And this is why I have trouble getting homework done on the weekends.

Cellphone Update: I got the replacement in the mail friday in a convenient box that had a return postage sticker in it. The only thing they didn't provide was the packing tape to reseal the box (whoever made the origional Palm Pilot did that). The new phone has the latest firmware and everything appears to be happy so far.

I started writing this in a comment on Smileloki's RSI post, but figured it'd be more useful here. Awhile ago, I got a wrist brace to help with my aching wrists and hands. It's been good so far, but isn't a "magic bullet" to cure a RSI.

In CS4 a few years ago, I got a severe RSI from pounding out code and chatting constantly. I looked around for RSI solutions and besides correct posture and a good desk setup, many expensive keyboards were suggested. Considering their $200-400 price range, I looked for a cheaper solution.

I decided take the plunge and switch to Dvorak (and more importantly, learn to type properly - fingers on the home-row, minimal moving of fingers, using pinkies and such.). That helped a great deal as I both slowed down during the re-learning process and ended up with a better typing style overall afterward.

Dvorak alone is not a super improvement over Qwerty - I prefer it, as I overall move my hands substantially less (watch someone typing in the two layouts; it's sorta nifty as typing on Dvorak almost looks like fake typing.), but the process of relearning to type was the most important. You can attempt to relearn to type in Qwerty, but I always find that I fall into old habits too quickly.

Of course, it takes a great deal of patience to relearn to type; ultimately, though, it is worth it. I found the best way to do this was by taking notes in class with a laptop/palmtop which is mapped to Dvorak. I tried to practice typing in Dvorak by chatting in AIM and on IRC, but that proved to be insanely frustrating: I couldn't keep up with the flow of conversation and ended up "reverting" to Qwerty to actually speak. Coding or writing papers in Dvorak is a decent alternative to notes, but deadlines make it look rather unappealing after awhile.

If you do make the switch, don't be discouraged. You will start off slow, but will also regain speed within a month or so. I now type a good 80WPM or so in Dvorak without much issue (I'm not sure if that's better than my Qwerty speed, but it probably is).

One last concern which is always brought up: compatibility. Yes, I can still type in Qwerty. When I was starting off, it took awhile to switch between the two. I had a "shaky finger" as my brain tried to decide which to use, but I've gotten to switching now. I can easily start typing on a Qwerty keyboard, but it'll take me a good 30 minutes to get back into the rhythm of Qwerty (I've heard of people who don't even have this time, and I'm guessing they actually use Qwerty on a semi-regular basis). I tend to find that most people's computers can easily be switched to Dvorak with minimal effort or problems on their part (OS X, GNU/Linux, ). My most recent frustration in that front has been with the modern Sun Blades which have magical new USB keyboards that are entirely unlike all their successors.

Ultimately, if you can spend about 1 month of time typing a bit slower (and 1-2 weeks being frustrated at your typing speed) in order to help prevent any RSI, Dvorak is a great choice.

How do I make my computer Dvorak?

So, how do you do it? It's easy!

Windows

Start → Settings → Control Panel → keyboard → Language → add → "Dvorak"

You should be able to switch it with the little icon in the tray.

Mac OS X

System Preferences → International → Dvorak

GNU/Linux with X 4.* (or anything running X 4.*)

setxkbmap dvorak

I also recommend the -option ctrl:nocaps -option compose:menu options. The former will turn your "caps lock" key into a spare "ctrl" key (no more bumping caps lock aND ACCIDENTALLY SHOUTING) and the latter will map that "menu" button to be a "compose" key.

To switch, I've a two scripts that run the setxkbmap with either the above option or setxkbmap pc104 (which is often the default). The one that switches to Qwerty is called aoeu and the one to Dvorak, asdf (that idea blatantly stolen from Tetron). You switch by rolling your left hand on the home row in a terminal.

2004-04-11 update: setxkbmap -option 'ctrl:nocaps' -option 'compose:menu' -option 'altwin:super_win' -option 'grp_led:caps' -option 'grp:shift_toggle' 'dvorak,us' This is wonderful. I hijacked the capslock LED to indicate Dvorak vs. Qwerty (the LED is on when it's Qwerty) and pressing both shift keys at the same time causes it to toggle layouts. No more hunting for a terminal to type "asdf" anymore :-) This is due to the fact that you can have up to 4 loaded layouts at once in XFree86 >= 4.3.

I stumbled across the info here: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/rules/xfree86.lst and /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/README.config .

Ahoy me mateys! I write this 'ere letter from a ship headin' from the coast o' Rarchestarr to Bawston. She's an old craft, but is quite speedy on the concrete seas. I be in Bawston fur th' weekend, seein' me mateys an' hearin the fine sounds of Delerium. Send me some word if ye be wantin' to meet up Satarday ur Sunday. Me ol' "sell-fone"'ll be right as rain so ye can give me a hollar on that there work o' witchcraft. I can't promise much, though, as me mateys may very well be takin' up all me time.

Aye, me lads and lassies: 'case ye hadn't heard th' word, today be Talk Like a Pirate Day. Save th' day me mateys, this be the best day of the yearrrr.

Yarrr. Mark me words, ye scurvy scallywags. They say lassies arn't ta be on a ship. Aye, it's not th' lassies but their chilluns who're ta be left at port. Thar be one such chillun 'board this 'ere vessel an' 'e be squeelin' like a gull o'er a fresh catch. I'm of mind ta toss th' lily-livered rascal in the brig an' see 'ow 'e likes th' looks of th' bars.

Here be me attempt at a unicode pirate smiley: ṗ-1

Every once in awhile, while in the shower or some other such monotonous task, I get ideas that I think just have to be written down. My first instinct is to draw up a HTML document on the idea, trying to organize and formalize it. One of the reasons for this is - well - I want to pass it on and see what others think.

I wrote up two such ideas recently: a way of transporting an inexpensive object (say, a borrowed book, a burned CD, or such) across a network of people. People are constantly moving; why not try and harness some of that movement for a collective good?

The other (which actually has market potential) is a slight tweak to a used book store. This used book redistribution network favours the movement of the book - the more the book moves on through the network, the more money the people involved in its transport get. If it were implemented well and if it caught on it'd be nifty. Of course, to be effective the users have to grok it (one of the main issues people have mentioned so far; it's very confusing). Maybe someday when I have money to burn and time to waste on projects like this, I'll put it together. Until then, I'll continue posting wacky ideas I have in hopes that anyone cares.

Cellphone update: Well, as I feared, the replacement phone didn't actually come in the mail. I called on Tuesday to confirm that they sent the order out, and I learned that they didn't even have a record of the order in their system. After 45 minutes on the phone with a nice customer service rep., I got a confirmed order and was told that it'd probably arrive by Monday. Most of the conversation was trying to figure out how I could possibly get a phone that I could borrow for the weekend, so I'd be able to twiddle plans while in Boston.

A fun quote from that conversation:

Me: "So, are there any T-Mobile stores that can get me a temporary phone until the new one arrives?"

..pause..

Rep: "Is New York large?"

Me: "Pardon?"

Rep: "Is New York rather large?"

Me: "Uh, Yeah. It's about 6 hours from here to New York City"

It turned out there were no places in the "loaner program" near me and that I'd have to go on an 8 hour bus ride and weekend in Boston with no cell/Internet connection (horror of horrors!). So, I asked him if it'd just be possible to buy a phone (with Bluetooth) and return it within their 14-day "no obligation" trial period and he said that would work.

I stopped by the local T-Mobile shop in the nearby mall and got a Sony Ericsson T68i (it was the cheapest they had with Bluetooth and I figured I'd try a new phone for kicks). So far, it's been working great on both my Palm and my laptop. I still can't get over how light the phone is - it feels like one of those empty "dummy demo models" they have at cheap electronics stores. I'm not so fond of it though - not enough features - and look forward to toting around a Nokia 3650 again.

Combine GeoURL with RSS aggregation and what do you get? Localized RSS feeds. Localfeeds is an aggregate which finds all the feeds in 50 miles of a given city and displays summaries on the site. *Waves to the Rochester blog world!* It'll be interesting watching city-level events be blogged in one spot. I've certainly gotten a kick out of watching the spread of memes through the various sites I read in my aggregated feed.

My next step is to get a better system for posting posts. Right now, as I wrote my blog engine myself, the post system is written in Perl and requires me to ssh into my main computer to write entries. This isn't bad really, as I can use emacs to compose nice HTML, but It'd be rather handy to have some XML RPC methods which I can post with, and the accompanying clients on my various wireless devices. I've pondered looking into switching over to MovableType, but I don't really have the time to write a conversion engine or any such things. Just ponderings for future ways to waste time.

On an unrelated note, some day I - and my army of kitten-seeking red robots - will create a meme that will take over the world. Just thought I'd give fair warning.

This has got to be the cutest ring-tailed lemur I've ever seen. I want one! In addition, people really need to get up and dance more. [from Boing Boing]

Oh, and regarding my cellphone which fatally crashed? The replacement (which, I might add, I said OK to them charging me $15 for next-day air) still has not arrived. Hopefully today will be my lucky day, but we shall see. Even if it does, I'm a bit paranoid that it will have the old firmware. Version 2.54 of the firmware came on the broken one and according to various messages boards, is quite buggy for other people too. Fluffy just got a one from T-Mobile and it came with version 2.54, so I'm a bit skeptical that they even have any with a newer version in stock.

My cellphone crashes while booting and there is no hard reset pin.

I love technology.

Bored in class, I decided to follow Ryan's lead and add a LOC record to staticfree.info's DNS entry. I also added a cute little GeoURL ICBM meta tag to staticfree.info's main page. Ryan likes the DNS entry better, but I think both have their place. The meta tag can be used for someone's about page or their blog, for example, while the DNS one wouldn't suffice. Of course, knowing where a physical server is can be quite handy as well, but for entirely different reasons.

All in all, you can do some pretty nifty lookups with GeoURL and get a map using the LOC data.

I'm back in Rochester, back at school. I've already gone to all my classes and they've been good. I've had two of the professors before (Carithers and Dalal), and I liked their teaching style. This time around I'll put more effort into their classes, so that should be good. The other two seem interesting enough (although my AI prof is both dry and unintelligible) and should provide for good classes.

3 out of my 4 classes are in building 70 - the new CS/IT/SE building - and I take notes on µ in HTML in them. Therefore, I'm generally online in those classes. I love technology.

I've been switching between various wireless devices recently, from my phone to my palm to my laptop. As such, I've been shuffling my online habits to accommodate that: using IMAP more frequently (on µ and my palm), I set up an email address solely for my phone (not entirely sure what I'll do with it), and started using Rawdog to read all my various blogs/sites.

Also on the software front, I added theming capabilities to my schedule system. I put together a nice "white and teal" theme that's actually readable on my palm. (the blacker theme is too black). I'll eventually switch all over to iCalendar. Maybe. I like certain features of the current calendar/schedule system as-is.

Oh, and now that I'm back at RIT I'm rediscovering how much I missed my crazy friends here. Julie, for example, is Very Cool™. Hopefully I'll meet a bunch of other random-crazy-cool people, as there's bound to be at least a few at a school mostly populated by CS/IT and photo majors.

Heading back to Rochester; heading home. Well, one of my homes anyway. I always ponder the concept of home as I have a few (various places in Newton and Rochester), one (the Interweb) or none. I like to think they're all homes of sorts, in their own rights. They all house people I care about, things I care about, and things I've created. Strange how one is but an abstract layer on top of the other two, yet that layer is itself a home. Would it perhaps be a metahome then? All I know is that, provided a cozy spot to sit, a beverage dispenser of some sort, and either WiFi or cellular reception, I can feel quite at home.

The summer's over already and classes are starting in a few days. My dad will be driving my self, my stuff and my new bike out tonight. The trip is a good 6-7 hours so sadly, I'll be missing Rochester.Amber as she leaves Saturday morning.I'll just have to join Kate sometime in the future and visit Amber's new apartment. :-)

It's so mechanical, packing. Consolidating a summer's worth of activities, saying goodbye, moving on again, and leaving behind only memories. I won't miss my dad's apartment (especially not the nasty bugs that occasionally visit it), just the people around it. Oh, how I wish someone'd create a transporter already! Or maybe just a high-speed train straight from BOS to ROC. Even cheap airfare between the two would be plenty! Until then I can only shuttle between cities toting µ, some tech and some clothes. I'll miss Bostony folks so much.

On the note of leaving, I may be coming back. It's still in the air, but I'll probably be back in Newton come winter quarter. FTRD seems to be open to the idea of me working there for another co-op session, I don't mind the extra money, and it'll then fill all my co-op requirements (assuming Pennie ever gets my two bloody credits submitted). All in all, too many people want me around Cambridge/Newton then for me to really be able to stay at RIT then. I just hope classes can coincide appropriately.

Oh, and apparently I can type around 88WPM (77WPM accounting for typos) in Dvorak on µ. I need to find a better tester though. Preferably one that isn't written in java. I'd pro'ly be a bit faster if it was using emacs, as I'm particularly keen on emacs' "undo" and "delete the previous word" bindings.

Sorry to those viewing the RSS feed that I've spammed. I decided it was silly to abbreviate my posts to only the first paragraph, so I got rid of that. I also forcibly escaped the HTML in the posts instead of wrapping it in a CDATA to try and make it more universal across RSS parsers. I'll eventually redo the entire thing as an RSS-encoded RDF, but that'll be when I have free time.

My weekend was joyously spent with Krazy Kris (With a 'k' like "kookie"), Miss Mink and a brief flirtation with a graveyard. After a pleasant evening with Kris, Saturday morning rolled around and so did my dad in our old Volvo. I, having finally re-acquired a learner's permit (this is #3) the day before (taking 2 hours in line. Just my luck as the day before that, the line was 7 minutes long and I was shooed away for not having "proof of residence") joined him on a pleasant Saturday spin around the graveyard.

I can't think of a better place to learn to drive than a large, beautiful graveyard. Except perhaps in the real world, but one tries to avoid that when first starting off. It was full of tricky turns, haunting hills, and ominous obstacles. Of course, it also accurately simulates not-quite-an-hour-rush-hour traffic at a wavering 15 miles per hour or below. I ended up driving for 1.5h which makes the total time I've driven a car in my life around 2 hours. Huzzah! Progress!

After my brief tour of the homes of the deceased, I trundled into Haaavad Square where I met up with Laurie and company. I hung out until I had to run off to a train for Worcester to visit Miss Mink.

Mink and I stayed up late playing on computers and then woke early for King Richard's Faire! The faire was more fun than I thought, but not as amazing as it had worked itself up to being. The various games were too spendy ($3.00 for 10 arrows to shoot into a arrow-pocked bale of hay), the food was of course up there in price (more annoyingly, it had an annoying "ticket" system where all real money transactions were traded for 50¢ tickets), and all merchandice was amazingly spendy. Then again, if you want to go spend a bunch of money on that sort of thing, this place is certainly the right place!

Of course, in light of all the spendyness, I gave in and actually got myself a new carrying case for my Palm. It's not as hardcore as Mink's skull pouch, but it was gotten from the same place; there's bound to be a little hardcore spilled over into it.

We returned to torment her suite-mates with random music which we were remarkably capable of singing along to. *Insert mental video clip of Mink and Xavier singing and bouncing with laptops on laps, joyously to Neutral Milk Hotel - Song Against Sex here*.

I ran off to home, to dinner, to Kris (sadly sans Star Trek), to work and thusly the summer routine will end. It's been an amazing summer and I wish it could last longer.

I opened the summer with a song lyric, and I think I'll close it with one too:

"We're here and now, but will we ever be again
'Cause I have found
All that shimmers in this world is sure to fade
Away again" - Fuel - Shimmer