This is the same person responsible for opening many people’s eyes about illtyperate ( -ism ?? ).

Well, there are two types of typists regardless of the layout :

1. Those who hunt-n-peck .. or look at the keyboard for any reason whatsoever …

2. Touch typists – they have trained their muscle memory to recognize they keys, and they seldom let their hands leave the confines of the all-holy “Home Row”

Yours truly likes to call himself pseudo – touch typist. I generally type at 60 wpm ( its pretty OK, go check yours here ) and sometimes look down on qwerty. On dvorak, which I am currently learning, I dont look down at all but I since I just started, I still dont use it for email etc. Probably in a couple of months.

Well, but the man point is that we all spend lots of amount on the computers and you are basically impairing yourself ( feel free to disagree ) if you dont type as fast as a normal touch-typist. With qwerty touch typing ( little more on dvorak )  , people generally get speeds of around 70 wpm ( whew! i am close).

If you dont belong in the second category and you still havent clicked on that link in the first line, do it now! I know that its long, and the guy is ranting a lot, and frankly he does exaggerates some things, but he gets the message across quite well.

Anybody inspired to start touch typing, leave your comments .. cheers!

It all started with my some abnormal pain in my hand one evening. So, I googled for something like “keyboard hands stress”.

tangent : I dont think I am the only one who considers google to be some sort of oracle or something. I sometimes feel pretty silly googling for trivial things for no good reason.

Anyways, so I hit “search” and got back loads of pages of RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury). And quite frankly, I was pretty freaked out. Not being able to use a keyboard or mouse for a long time is something that I find extremely disconcerting and disturbing.

(another) tangent:  It feels like having your arm bent by some bully in the playground and not being able to get back at the prick ( well, thts why he is the BULLY).

Getting back to the point, one of the tips for beating RSI was switching from qwerty to another keyboard layout called dvorak.Firstly, a little background on dvorak and why it was developed.

Well, long long ago, there were typewriters. Whenever typists used to type fast, the typewriter used to get jammed. So these clever guys scrambled the typewriter keys to basically limit your speed. If you go faster than a certain level, you will feel strained and well therefore you will type slower than your brain is actually processing stuff. So,  an “educational psychologist and a professor of education”[sic] by the name of August Dvorak and another fellow called William Dealey analysed the most common typing patterns for the english language and designed a new and easier to use keyboard layout called the “Simplified Dvorak Layout”. Its pretty different from the qwerty layout but its much easier to use. For example, all the vowels are in one place, common punctuations are grouped together etc. Small things which basically make typing less strenuos.

The current world speed typing record is 210 words per min. No surprise that its held by a dvorak user. This by no means implies that a normal dvorak user will type at at 210 wpm. A normal user would still max out around 100-120 depending on what they are doing. But the point is that you would actually move your hands much lesser and hence strain yourself lesser.

Over time, many variants of dvorak have been developed. Most of these keep the letters same as “ANSI dvorak” but modify position of other things to make it easier for a particular task. For example, there is a programmer’s dvorak which makes symbols like ‘;’, ‘{‘, ‘}’ ‘.’ etc easier to reach. This is obviously based on the analysis of classical statically typed programming language like C, pascal and basic. There is no proof that you will program faster if you use the keyboard ( ofcourse not).

Notable users of dvorak – steve wozniak , bram cohen, matt mullenweg .

BUT ALL THIS ONLY APPLIES IF YOU TOUCH-TYPE. Do you still HUNT-N-PECK ??? THEE is ILLTYPERATE!!!! more on that in the next post  ;D

I read this the other day and then read it again and then once more. Then I laughed. I felt like someone was speaking my mind. As someone who has stayed half his life in India and half outside it, I am somewhat intrigued by the notion of patriotism.

I do remember being very “patriotic” as a kid when I was studying in India. But I have questioned my patriotism over the past few years. What is really patriotism? To me, from a third persons point of view,  its a feeling that overwhelms you on 15th August and 26th January when u watch that parade or you listen to some patriotic song. I do confess that at times that still gives me goosebumps.

But seriously, is patriotism just something like blind faith in the idea that you love you country? Is it just something you are supposed to be as a good citizen? Is not being patriotic traitorous??

Well this is what I concluded : If you love your country, do something for it. If you dont do anything, you are no patriot but just a hypocrite. I mean how can you call yourself a patriot if apart from 2 days of the year, you are whining about what your country lacks(thats just cynical) or just oblivious to it all. Because how can you truly love something if you do not do your bit to improve it. In that sense, “true patriot” is something that only a few deserved to be called. All others, well I like to call them the 2-day patriots.  My patriotism status, lets leave that for another day .

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_July_22,_2009 for more.

I have always been fascinated by a solar eclipse. I still remember a particular one somewhere around 1998 I guess. Mom let me look up at the eclipsed sun with a pair of Dad’s RayBan and good number of XRay sheet bundle. Talk about improvisation. I dunno how it looks like from those viewing decks with UV filter telescopes, but I still remember seeing a pretty cool eclipse, with the flaring ring around the sun and all.

All those who CAN see it, I’d say dont miss this one, supposed to be the longest one of the 21st century yet.

http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/07/helping-more-people-discover-books.html

He has put online the entire Richard Feynman lecture series at the Microsoft Research website(http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html). Its really amazing quality and if you like physics but it was probably never presented to you the right way [like the kind of crap they teach in first year engineering], go check this out.

Great stuff, too bad it cant be downloaded. But you gotta appreciate Gates for actually buying the rights and putting it online for free viewing.Kudos!

P.S. Scribefire aint all that bad

On twitter, a measure of your popularity is the number of followers that you have. And the way this can be exploited for cash is : If I somehow get 20000 followers, then every single message that I send reaches 20,000 people. Now this is the crux : If I use these messages to direct people to certain sites and get paid by those sites, I can make a decent profit!

Not bad huh? So, even if an average “virtual” users tweet convinces 2% of his followers to click that link , that’s 400 people with just one tweet. “I can give you 10,000 hits a day” sounds good to any webmaster (wish I could afford it).

But the thing is, how do such’virtual’ tweeters ever accumulate followers? Well, its all in a script. The script makes the ‘virtual’ user automatically follow those people who tweet on a topic SIMILAR to the links it sends out usually. And believe me, if you are new to twitter, you don’t mind someone with a decent pic and similar minded tweets following you. AND twitter etiquette says that you follow back whoever follows you! So, they get one more potential ‘bakra’.There you go, its targeted advertising that just works!

Well , why don’t I like these guys?? I don’t like them because they are using something meant for simple communication between friends to make profit BY misleading their followers. I mean if I own a company and I advertise my own products, that’s fine! But this is just directing people to random unknown sites. The script even sends a great thank you direct message “Hey thanks for following me! Keep me in the loop with DMs ok? tc xyz”.Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggghhh!!!!

Some tips on spotting the fake tweeters: They NEVER tweet from ‘web’. Its always ‘API’ or twitterfeed’ (anything that can be programmed with the freely available twitter API).And there will always be this regularity to their tweets.After exactly two or three hours, it sends out some links.Not two hours 15 mins, not 16 mins, exactly 2hours!

I just don’t like any sort of advertisement on the web when I don’t wanna buy anything! As if google ads on every single web-page(even GMail) was not enough!  Hello, does my email SAY that I wanna buy xyz product that you want me to buy it??Just leave us alone!

P.S. I know that previously you had to sign in to comment but I’ve fixed it [ASSUMING that even one of you ever thought of commenting, which would be such a nice thing ]

I will try and list as many as I can :

1. Unless you never get out of your house, there is a good chance you often walk by areas with loads of leaves just lying on the ground. Yes!! stamping on those dry leaves for the heck of it! And the added crackling crisp sound just adds to the moment. Its quite inconsequential and pointless, but I don’t we all do it. I’d probably rank this is one of my personal best compared to the upcoming ones.
2. For this one, I am not just sure, I know all of you have done it at least once…after a great long warm bath…the mist on the mirror in the bathroom. Oh yes! some of us written our names on it while others might have done something more imaginative. And if you think about it, its not just bathroom mirrors, windows, cars…basically anything. There seems to be something quite universal about the itch in people to write their names in such places.
3. Well, I experienced a lot of this staying in the hostel. Sometimes you just have to wake up at night to do what you gotta do, and often the walk is quite chilling to say the least (I am talking about a Chandigarh winter – often below 5 deg). But the comforting warmth of the bed and the pillow when you get back, its more than worth it. This actually rates highest on the “Satisfaction” parameter, if I were to rank this list.
4. Feeling a cool breeze on your face in the evening of a summer day. Great feeling..
5. This one is a bit subjective, but its still pretty…I’d use the word fulfilling…and I am talking about the time when you support the underdog, and he wins. It could be a sport, or even a corporate tussle, or anything else. There is something that everyone likes about the one who beats all odds and achieves something he was never expected to.

Well, I have made a list of 5 and I think they all live up to the description I gave in the first paragraph. But the list is by no means exhaustive. I do have a few more ideas in my head but I would like you dear reader, to leave a comment with your one of your ideas. If you don’t have a new idea, at least comment about one of the above or add something to them.

Have a good day…

Here’s to my first blog post!
Cheers