Stuart Hacking

Right! This is a rant. I currently work in an Open Plan office. This is designed to encourage a better atmosphere where people can discuss things and collaborate? Or is it easier for a boss to keep an eye of who’s slacking off? Whatever the intention, I notice the following effects:

• All barriers for sound are removed. This typically make the office very noisy. You are likely to hear: One half of a conference call, One half of a heated discussion about insurance or heating installation, sighs, coughs, yawns, shuffles, footsteps, coffee slurping, chairs creaking, necks cracking, fingers typing. If, like me, you tend to shift your attention quite rapidly it becomes a cacophony.
• At any given time, there is at least one pair of eyes looking at you – and you are guaranteed to look back. This causes that awkward social phenomena of “mutual paranoia” wherein both parties stare at each other wondering how long the other has been watching.

What’s the alternative? I think individual cubicles is the other extreme. It encourages isolation (The geek in me just had a brief moment of excitement as I typed that, but the human in me wants to cling to the hairline cord of social adeptness). At Microsoft, I think they had a fairly good solution. The office was separated into cubicles, but each cubicle had 3-4 people… usually on the same projects. This means that sounds from elsewhere are well muted and you can still lean round for a chat with your colleague.

Well, the company I work for are hoping to move to new premises at some point in the near future. (Deliberate vagueness avoids trouble). I really want to suggest a move away from open plan but I don’t think the idea would be taken seriously: Next to MEETINGS it’s the best excuse for the lack of productivity!

Typed at 1am- please forgive spelling/grammar.

Self life, Office, Rant, social

I read an article a while back by Steve Yegge.  In case you don’t know, Steve is a programmer.  He is also a blogger.  A big blogger.  I don’t mean simply that he really likes to blog- I mean he writes big blog entries. He also tends to write very good blog entries and if you have an interest in programming or business or just want a good read then I highly recommend checking him out.

I read an article.  It didn’t leave me with the warm glow of a satisfying read.  It left me with a guilty, hollow feeling.  This article might have been called “Stuart’s Story: The death of typing”, or “Stuart, I know all about your lazy habits.” Or… you get the picture.  The point is, Steve was talking directly to me.

You see, I’m also a programmer.

I’m a programmer and it’s been about 10 years since I fell of the touch-typing wagon.

However, I’m not one to stay disheartened.  As of this moment I intend to take the advice given in the article and re-learn to touch type.  Not only that, but I also intend to do it using the Dvorak layout.  Qwerty isn’t a standard- it’s a widely adopted flaw, designed to slow typists to a speed that wouldn’t jam those mechanical typewriters.

In the hopes that my own short experience so far might benefit others I present the steps I’m taking to re-aquaint myself with touch typing:

1. I have blanked the keys on my MacBook – and will do so on any other keyboard I own now.  Here’s a fairly cheap and effective way to do it.  Buy stickers from this site (their P&P is reasonable, even to the UK) – 4Keyboard Blank Stickers. The resulting keyboard looks like this: Blanked MacBook
2. Get a typing tutor, preferably one that will do focussed drills rather than just punching in random strings.  I’m currently trying to demo of Ten Thumbs Type Tutor. Which is rather fun and features a Viking!  (It’s not free but there is a 10 day trial.  So far I’m rather impressed)
3. Learn the drills and common patterns.  Whether on Qwerty or Dvorak, learn patterns like: the, ion, uous, at, in, etc. Building up a good vocabulary of common use strings will help to build up an acceptable speed early on, allowing you to adopt quicker.  (I think I recall Steve mentioning this in his post.)
4. Practice.  This is the stage I am at and will probably be at for a good while to come.  I trust Steve when he says that it only takes about 30 minutes a day to get reasonably proficient – but it goes without saying that this takes a bit of dedication.

This was a useful post for me to lay down some goals for the future.  I hope anyone reading found it interesting too.

Peace.

Self keyboard, life, mac, typing

While my MacBook typically runs as happily as ever, I have started to notice that various folders are becoming somewhat messy.  There is no explanation other than the laziness of the user.

My ‘documents’ folder, for example, is fully of unclassified .c, .h, .tex, .pdf – all the files of the day with cryptic titles to boot.  Such examples include: al_7.aux and booktest.log.  Months on I can’t remember what happened to the ‘Als’ which preceded number 7, nor can I remember which book I was testing.  In short, I really need to clean up my documents.

I’m somewhat reluctant to start though in case I decide to buy OS 10.5 soon – *gasp* yes, ok… My ‘last-year’ MacBook is still running Tiger.  I will join the 21st century yet!

Self, Software documents, laziness, life, mac

I often feel a little sad that – being a child of the 80s – I will never have the chance to operate a Lisp Machine.  They were popular around the time that AI was the big buzzword in Computer Science, then they died out when that bubble burst.  Today the buzzwords are ‘Cloud Computing‘, ‘Virtualisation‘, ‘Agile Development‘ and all kinds of terms related to abstraction of services, infrastructure and development.  (The very things that Lisp offered.

As an homage to these archaic list processing behemoths, I have followed the instructions on clisp.cons.org for setting up Common Lisp as a login shell.  So far it’s looking surprisingly good.  It has the features of bash – for the most part – infused with the ability to directly evaluate lisp expressions and save the definitions out as you work.

The instructions on clisp.cons.org call for a lot of package compilation and dependency walking but if you are running a fairly recent debian or ubuntu system then you should be able to get up and running by installing the following packages through apt-get:  clisp clisp-dev cl-ffi libreadline5.

So – that’s the shell now running through Lisp.  Next step is to have a separate processor performing symbol tagging and type checking, hardware implementations of primitive lisp procedures, … etc!

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Self, Software fun, life, lisp, shell, Software, unix

Like many other people who have long standing GMail accounts and now use an iPhone (or possibly other smartphone) I am somewhat disappointed by the lack of push notification service.  Here I offer my solution- It’s not perfect and hopefully at some point GMail will support push notification.

Requirements

• Mobile Me account
• Gmail Account
• iPhone

Self, Uncategorized email, integration, iphone, life, me, mobile, push, technology

So, I was in Tesco yesterday getting a tape converter for my car stereo… (I know, finally!!) and the girl at the counter asked me: “What are these audio cassette converters for?”

I answered. “Oh, you can put them into a car tape player and listen to a CD or MP3 player in the car.” 

She nodded but I still remained unsure that she understood.  As I left the store the sudden realisation hit me.  She wasn’t really asking “What is an audio cassette converter?”  She was asking “What is an Audio Cassette?”

Those darn kids better get off my lawn!

Self, Uncategorized car, cassette, fun, getting old, life, music, technology

The shameless “I use twitter now.” post.

Well, it’s true. You can find me at: http://www.twitter.com/stuhacking

The thing that attracts me is the idea of a simple, free update service.  I use twitteriffic on OS X which pops up an unintrusive growl notification when people post- I’m sure similar programs exist for other platforms.

Geek, life blogging, life, twitter

This applies to most mornings, I’m lucky enough this semester to not have any lectures before twelve o’clock, which gives me the freedom to choose; will I appear in the lab early, enthusiastic and ready to take on the day? or will I sleep in, take time over breakfast and casually arrive just in time?

Not really a choice at all.

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University, life life, morning, University

The obligatory Happy new year post for 2007, only a few days late ^_^;

Well, I hope everyone had a nice break from work for however long or short it was… all two of you.

Technically I’m still off for yet another month, however as exams start to loom closer it feels less and less like a holiday and more a period of rapid reading and trying to force my mind to remember stuff it really doesn’t want to. I still can’t imagine why I would ever want to know about marketing or economics; at this point neither topic is something that dwells in the forefront of my mind. I’m sure they are great subjects, and if I ever feel like moving into that area in the future I could research them myself. Forcing students to take on an unrelated topic like this, whilst also balancing the work for the important modules is something Queen’s excels in.

Anyway, I’ll try to avoid the long austere road of Queen’s and stick to the lighter topic. Once again, I hope the new year was extremely bearable for everyone reading.

University, life life

A friend on MSN has been harrassing me for a while to leave Blogger and create a WordPress blog, so here I am, hopefully to stay. I must admit the management features and themes seem a lot cleaner and more elegant than blogger for a start, and it also let’s me add feeds to the sidebar which is a nice feature.

Something I’ve always felt was missing on Blogger was the ability to categorise posts – I’ll use that quite a bit.

So that’s it for now, thanks for reading. yet another, “new blog” post.

Uncategorized blogging, life, yanbp