Freedom Dreams

Soo, its over a week since my exams ended \o/… now I just have the long wait for results day near the end of August. So, now I have time to write a long overdue blog post. There are two things that make this blog post different to previous ones…

Firstly I’ve started using the microblogging service identi.ca again. For the uninitiated, identica (I never know whether to include the full stop or not) is basically a free software version of twitter, which uses an open protocol. (The software is actually called laconica, and anyone on one laconica instance can follow anyone on any other laconica instance.) I’m not on twitter because, most the people who’d want to read my messages (people in the free software/open tech movement) are on identica (or some other laconica site) anyway.

I’m not entirely sure how to use identica yet. I don’t mean with regards to the technical aspect, type 140 characters or less into a box on the website, or in a client such as Gwibber, and you’re away. No, I mean what to type, how, and when in order to make it most useful for me. At the moment I’m probably overusing it a little at the moment, but I think what it boils down to for me is a notebook. A notebook that is published for others to see, should they find it interesting. But equally, a notebook for me to look back at. For example, I’m writing this blog posts using some of my notices as reference (tags make this especially useful. I don’t know if you can show tags for just one user yet though).

And the second thing? I’m writing this blogpost using yet another different keyboard layout, colemak. This is the second time that I have switched layout, the first being to dvorak. Colemak is still slightly less popular than dvorak (it is third after dvorak and qwerty). So what made me switch? The fact that I had several weeks to spend doing something rather pointless… well kindof. But colemak does have some nice benefits. Your fingers move much less than on either qwerty or dvorak (dvorak places emphasis on hand alternation instead). But what really sets colemak apart from dvorak? Its pragmatism.

Okay, I’m not sure that’s quite the right word, but it sounds good. Basically, whereas dvorak moves keys, including punctuation, all over the place, making it harder and more formidable to learn, colemak moves only letter keys and not all of them at that. Many of the loss common keys, especially those on the bottom row, are in exactly the same place as in qwerty. This is ro much so (especially to the far left) that I showed the layout to a friend, who said, “thats not much different to a normal keyboard”. That would never happen with dvorak.

This may be a silly thing to be picking up on, but its important. As much as I like to be weird and different, it would be great if more people started trying more efficint layouts. Not only is colemak easier to learn coming from qwerty, it also simply looks less intimidating – making perple more likely to give it a go.

Confession time. I didn’t actually find colemak any easier to learn than dvorak, but that is because i was previously using dvorak full time, and dvorak and colemak are *very* different. However, the similarity to qwerty did manifest itself in a different way: it was much much easier to switch between colemak and qwerty than it had been between dvorak and qwerty. In fact, for the first couple of days, whilst I was learning, I used qwerty at night to type faster to people.

This is in *massive* contrast to dvorak. Whilst dvorak destroyed my qwerty skills at first, and i never properly recovered them, using colemak actually seems to have improved my qwerty typing! This ability to have both the common and the efficient layout at a good proficiency, without them conflicting inside your mind, is what really sets colemak apart from dvorak in my opinion. The fact is, as efficint as a layout might be, you’re still going to run into qwerty quite often in this society we are in, and colemak allows you to have the best of both worlds.

I’ve been practising and learning colemak for just over a week now. Its now very usable, although, maybe not as fast as I would like. More than good enough for writing an 800 word blog post. And, the problem in my case is not with colemak itself, it is coming to it from the weirdness of dvorak.

So, do I think most people will be using colemak it any time soon? No, afraid not. However, I do think its a great alternative, and hopefully, as aproachable as it is, will attract a growing userbase, in the geek community at least.

So, I decided to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout. I’m writing this post in it….. vvveeeerrrryyyy slowly. I’ve just about got to the point where I can use Dvorak to chat on IRC, but I still have a deep sypathy for those who can’t touch type.

I am trying Dvorak just for the fun of it – its supposed to be better than qwerty, anh although I think that its probably true, I don’t see any benefits yet due to the steep learning curve… I guess thats how many people feel about Linux or free software in general. Fear of change is not completely irrational… effort is required to make that change. All we can try to do is reduce the work involved as much as possible; but more importantly, wemust make it evident to people that their effort will be worthwhile.

I would write a bit more, but it is painstakingly slow…..

In ether news, the third episode of Freedom Socks, my free software podcast, has been released. Have a listen and please tell me what you think.

Recently my computer broke. It was turning itself off, and after it had done this a few times (with decreasing times between), I realised that the power supply was getting very hot. I could more or less tell that it was the power supply fan that was causing this, but I wasn’t 100% sure about how to go about fixing this.

So, my parents get a guy called Andrew to sort it out. He seems a nice guy – he reinstalled our pc back in the Windows ME days (yes, Windows ME :’( ), and apparently he know runs ubuntu on one of his machines. Anyway, he orders a new fan for us, and then fits it a few days later when it arrives. Now, when I say fit it, it wasn’t as simple as slipping it back where the old one went; the new fan was slightly larger than the old one, so making it fit correctly involved cutting and filing at bits of plastic.

Now, I would like to be able to fix my pc myself, and I would be relatively comfortable replacing a hard drive, RAM, graphics card, cd drives or even the main fan. But the power supply is one of those rally tricky things. It is very specific to the case – not standardised at all. I guess it would be within my range now (having seen the powe rsupply removed and refitted), to fit a whole new power supply, but I wouldn’t have a clue about how to do all the messing about to fit a whole fan.

Well, I’ve been saying I would like to be able to sort out my pcs myself. Partly, this is for the feeling of control over those pesky machines, but more importantly it would save us money. We paid Andrew £40 (which he probably deserved after all that filing) – but, it makes me wonder – should I try and get a job in computing? He did mention that he knows people in London who are getting paid £500 a day for php programming. £500 A DAY FOR PHP!! Surely that must the exception rather than the rule. If not, perhaps I should brush up on my php skills…

Its forth rembmering though, I’m going to be rather picky when its come to computing jobs. I would prefer to use exclusively free software, and most of the time, that is not an option. I certainy would not want to develop propreitary software! Which is why I was thinking Physics would be the best for me, but still, £500 a day!?

Whilst my friend Joe has been having fun taking apart his TV, I’ve been trying to make a rather brocken laptop useful in some way. I took it off someone thinking that just the screen was broke and I could use my monitor to make it quite a useful stationary machine. No such luck! The hard drive was also brocken.

Now, here’s the interesting bit, you would expect my live cds to work fine, even though the hard drive is broke. No, my ubuntu cd fails, so does DSL, but a gparted disk and a puppy disk boot into X fine. It would seem that the live cds panic if they see a disk, but it doesn’t work properly. Actually removing the hard disk seems to have solved that problem, l and Ubuntu boots.

But, we’re not sorted yet. My main use for any machine is the internet. Ubuntu live CD gets the internet fine over ethernet, but i have no wired access upstairs (where I want to use the machine) and the wireless is being a pain. I guess I could mess with the wireles a bit, but it needs yucky proprietary drivers and any changes I make won’t we saved.

So, I want some way to have a persistent system. I’ve tried using a usb stick, but to no avail. It doesn’t help that parted freaks out when it sees my disks and refusing to deal with it properly. (It sees no filesystem, even when there is one, and says my disk is a quarter of its actual size).

Lastly, I attempted using pxe – I was quite surprised to find that the laptop supports this out of the box. After finally getting to grips with how pxe linux works, I managed to get a kernel booted. However, the filesystem is supposed to be carried over nfs, but it just would not happen. It might help if I had a direct ethernet connection between the two machines, but I need a new ethernet card for that.

So, I’ve put the project to one side for now. Hopefully, sometime this week I’ll be able to get hold of Joes old pc (before he obliterates it like his TV) and then I’ll have more hardware to work with.

I’ve done a bit with wine the last few days. I tried to get a few of my windows to run for myself, albeit not very successfully – mainly because I don’t really need them anyway.

Then, yesterday, I was given the task of getting WoW and the Orange box to work on a friends Kubuntu install ( my only convert). Annoyingly, the problem was not really wine, but a bug in the drivers of the intel graphics card..

I fixed this by editing some WoW graphics options, the opengl one (of course), but the biggest improvement seemed to be this tweak, despite the fact that it is designed for ATI cards. (Although, tbh I tried most of the things further up that page as well.)

As for the Orange Box, after much fustration, I found that I could get counterstrike and team fortress to work by using a “Launch Option” that reduced the version of Direct X that was used (to 7.0 for these games).

Thing is though, it seemed to take me ages to fix, much longer than I thought it would. Especially, as I didn’t manage to get all of the Orange Box to work (in particular Portal), I felt little sense of achievement. Perhaps this is just the nature of fixing things: if something is broke (especially after following application specific tutorials in the case of wine), then the problem is likely to be something you wouldn’t expect, and is by its nature hard to find.

Hmmmmmm, I wonder if anyone will understand the above, I hardly do myself . *Sigh* I guess thats what happens when you let your thoughts stew in your mind for a day. I guess the thing with writing stuff down is you need to do it whilst the thoughts are still fresh in your mind.