It’s a strange looking thing, but it makes sense… why do we waste our thumbs on regular keyboards?

Kinesis Advantage Keyboard

Now, on to the notes I took as I adjusted to the keyboard…:

Observations:

Day 1:

The C key is hard to hit because I’m used to overreaching with my middle finger. The 9 key is where I expect the (zero) key to be. I hit v instead of b sometimes. Overall, I like it, but my typing speed has dropped a *lot*. I’m probably typing at about 40% of my normal speed. Lots of mistakes. What do I like? The thumb keys feel great, but I’m not used to them. The braces {} need to move someplace else because I do a lot of C# programming. I’ve remapped ESC to CAPS lock (vim) and remapped = to the home key (also because I use it a lot for programming).

Overall impression: It’s a change, for sure. I like the feel of the keyboard. I don’t like all of the mistakes I’m making while typing.

Day 2:

Accuracy is greatly improved. I’m probably at 70% of my old typing speed. I hit the SPACE sometimes when I mean to hit ENTER, but that isn’t too much of a problem. I remapped the up and down arrows so that they change places. This makes them consistent with VIM’s j/k up down navigation. I’m thinking about swapping { and [ so that { can be access without shift and [ can be accessed with shift.  This will make C coding easier. Also planning on doing the same for } and ].

This keyboard is really comfortable once you start to get used to it!

Day 3:

I didn’t do as much typing today (too many meetings!), but spent some time working on spread sheets. The arrow keys are slowing me down a lot because I’m not used to them. Also I hit them sometimes by accident and that causes all kinds of confusion because the cursor will suddenly move from where I’m typing. Also CTRL+SHIFT+ARROW sequences are so different that they’re taking some time to get used to . CTRL+SHIFT+B is also more awkward than a normal keyboard (visual studio build shortcut).

Day 7:

Typing is back up to 90-95% of normal. The distance between ALT and TAB was annoying me today. I might need to fix that somehow in the future. The braces that I was worried about {} have grown on me a lot as have the arrow key placements.  Having gotten used to them, I’ve noticed that I have to move my hands a lot less to type them, even though the opposite might seem true when you first look at this keyboard. On a regular keyboard they would be hard to find and type because of the staggered key layout. The Kinesis layout keeps everything in rows and columns and that makes finding those keys easy when you’re not looking.

I’ve only reprogrammed 3 keys and plan to leave it that way for now. CAPS LOCK is mapped to ESC. the UP arrow and DOWN arrow keys are swapped too. Also, I used to key puller to physically swap the arrow keys  – nice!. All three of these changes were done to make using vim easier. If you don’t use vim, you might want to remap CAPS LOCK to something more useful (ctrl or alt maybe?). I would still recommend the arrow key swap because then you’ll be prepared if you ever do want to try vim

• ArsClip – A very handy clipboard manager… a little bit like vim’s yank ring, but for windows!
• Chrome or Firefox? I don’t know which is better anymore…
• F.lux – change your monitor to match the temperature of the lights in the room
• Foxit Reader – A really fast pdf viewer
• GVIM - Only geeks need apply!
• Notepad++ – a really great free text editor
• Paint.NET – Think Microsoft Paint, but on steroids.
• PUTTY
• Synergy – One Keyboard, One Mouse, Multiple Computers.
• Sysinternals Suite – a bunch of great tools including Process Explorer.
• Thunderbird - the only way to read email (besides Mutt of course!)
• WinSCP- FTP, SFTP, Other? Covered.

From the NOT free but worth it department:

• Beyond Compare – If you work with any kind of text file on a regular basis, you need this. Period.

It’s really a variation on the classic theme – don’t repeat yourself; write as little code as possible; keep it simple; don’t make me think.

One of the best ways of accomplishing this is to approach creating software like deer hunting. The best hunters know that there are certain natural funnels  – places where deer tend to run. These are the best places to put up a tree stand. You wait for the deer to come to you. You don’t go running around trying to corral the deer. If there’s a river, you find a place that is narrow and shallow to hunt because it is a natural crossing. Over time you’ll see every deer in the surrounding area.

This technique also applies to software development. Find one place in the code to solve your problem. You have an additional advantage too – you can create the bottlenecks – the places where everyone crosses the river so to speak.

At work we have an OO based framework that all of our web apps use. The people who designed it didn’t take full advantage of the natural bottlenecks. Rather than adding code to our Page_Load base method to check if the application should redirect the user to a “sorry, but we’re down while the batch runs” page, they put code in EVERY page of EVERY application. Worse, they put a class in every application that is around 500 lines long. I did a diff between two of these classes. Less than 10 lines of difference. What does this mean? It means that 490 lines of code could be moved into a base class and the 10 lines of code could simply be overridden to provide the appropriate configuration values.

In short, the total amount of code in each application to support this feature could have been less than 10 lines of code instead of 500! In our current situation, if a bug is found in the duplicated code it would take us more than 100 hours of effort to update every application and deploy them. If this code had been put in a base class, we’d just have to update it in one place.

I like to run distributed.net on my computers. I want the CPU frequency to stay pinned at the lowest possible frequency while distributed.net is running. I also want my computer to boost it’s CPU speed if I’m using it for something else. Using Linux, this is easy to accomplish. First you’ll want to make sure that distributed.net is running with a low ‘nice’ priority level (it does this by default). Secondly, you’ll want to add this to your /etc/rc.local:

echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/ondemand/ignore_nice_load

By doing this, you’re telling Linux to use the minimum CPU speed possible for programs with a ‘nice’ (e.g. low) priority level while giving it permission to boost the CPU speed if necessary for other software running on computer. Lower CPU speeds require less electricity and this leads to cheaper electric bills – both a good thing

One final caveat… after all that work, your computer will probably still use a few more watts than it would if it were completely idle at the lowest clock speed. This is because it is doing work that requires the CPU to use more circuits than it would in a normal idle loop. Caveat aside, you’ll still be using a lot less power than if your CPU were allowed to run at the top clock speed, and only a small amount more than it would normally idle!

And a new one running Debian that is a lot faster…

CPU0: Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.60GHz stepping 06
503MB LOWMEM available.


I need to copy around 100GB of data from the SPARCstation to the new server. The SPARCstation is able to push around 300KB/sec tops unencrypted over the network. Normally I’d be using rsync over ssh, but in this case, it will actually slow things down. So slow that it would literally take over a week to copy this data! The fastest way I’ve found is to use netcat and tar together. By using this combination I’m freeing up the CPU on the SPARCstation to do more important things like read data off of the disks and push it over the network!

Notice that I’m not using compression with tar… once again, sparky just isn’t fast enough


#Sender (SPARCStation)
tar cf - * | netcat receiver_host_name_or_ip 7000


#Receiver (new computer)
netcat -l -p 7000 | tar xv


List-ID: <linux-kernel.vger.kernel.org>
List-Id: Learn about the Linux kernel <kernelnewbies.kernelnewbies.org>
List-Id: cocci.diku.dk

To get started, let’s state in English what we want to find: Dear procmail; please find the word that immediately precedes the first period in a line that begins with “List-Id:”

Finding these headers is easy with a regular expression… IF… you’re allowed to use look ahead: ^List-Id:.*?( (?!.*<)|<)([^.]*)

BUT, procmail doesn’t do look ahead

So let’s try with procmail’s regular expressions. Aside from look ahead/behind, there are two other major differences between procmail’s regular expressions and the rest of the world. First, procmail uses \/ to mark the portion of the expression that will be copied into $MATCH. Secondly, the part of the regular expression to the left of the \/ uses non-greedy matching. So when you write .* procmail treats it like .*? this is the feature that makes matching the three list headers I want to grab quite difficult.

With this in mind:
Matches the linux-kernel list:
^List-Id: *<\/[^.]*

Matches linux-kernel and kernelnewbies:
^List-Id: .*<\/[^<]?[^.]*

Notice the extra [^<]? which tells procmail that we want $MATCH to start after the < character. This is what allows the rule to find kernelnewbies without pulling < into $MATCH. This is necessary because procmail isn’t being greedy when it matches to the left side of \/.

Now, our remaining problem is the cocci mailing list. This one really makes life difficult. I decided that using a single regular expression just isn’t possible, so that means we’ll need two. One to grab the cocci mailing list and one to grab everything else. Here’s the completed procmail rule (note: I use Maildir and not mbox on my mailserver).

:0
* ^List-Id: \/[^.]+
{
        #list with <>
        #e.g. List-Id: Learn about the Linux kernel <kernelnewbies.kernelnewbies.org>
        #e.g. List-Id: <linux-kernel.vger.kernel.org>
        :0
        * $MATCH ?? ^.*<\/[^<]+
        .MailingLists.$MATCH/

        #list without <>
        #e.g. List-Id: cocci.diku.dk
        :0
        .MailingLists.$MATCH/
}

First, enable YouTube in DroidWall (yeah, obvious). This lets YouTube do searches and the like. But videos still won’t play. To get them working, check the boxes next to “Media server” in DroidWall’s list of apps. There, all better

• Agenda Widget
• Barcode Scanner
• Bump
• Compass
• Connect Bot
• Dolphin Browser HD
• Droidwall
• Google Maps
• Google Street View
• Google Sky Map
• Google Voice
• K-9 Mail
• Listen
• Netflix
• Pandora
• Ringdroid
• Skype
• Swype
• Voice Caller ID
• The Weather Channel
• Youtube

It makes upgrading and installing packages a breeze – once you log in, the package path is setup automatically based on the release you’re running. The next time you use pkg_add, there’ll be no thinking involved and that’s a good thing!

The only problem here is that the killer feature that no one else “supports” is the raw disk access. I want to use this for my primary file server. Can I trust Virtual Box? Maybe… the file server is running Nexenta with ZFS  over two 1TB disks in a Raid 1 configuration… or I could leave it on real hardware where it has a real chance of working without any problems