james mckay dot net

I have given up on Dvorak once and for all. It does make for much more disciplined typing, but I found that just as I was getting up to speed on it, I was beginning to experience some discomfort in my right hand and arm. There are some nasty artefacts in Dvorak, perhaps the worst of which is the position of the L key, in the top right hand corner of the keyboard. Having to stretch your pinky as much as that gets really sore after a while. Since the main reason why I started looking into alternative keyboard layouts was that for the past two years I have been experiencing some general fatigue and mild discomfort on and off in my right arm in the first place, I thought that it would be prudent to take note. I was also finding it very uncomfortable to type URLs on my Kinesis keyboard, where said pinky has to do the Riverdance to handle the forward slash and the shift key for the colon, then move out of the way to let your right middle finger handle the “www”.

At the moment I am back on QWERTY at work and hating it. However, there is a very promising new kid on the block as far as keyboard layouts are concerned: Colemak. Unlike Dvorak, it takes QWERTY as its starting point and only shuffles some of the keys around, leaving almost all the punctuation and symbols and some of the less frequently used letters in pretty much the same place. This makes for a much more comfortable typing experience that is also much easier to learn, and it has none of the nasty artefacts of Dvorak either.

After only two or three evenings, I am already more comfortable with it than I was after three weeks of going completely cold turkey on Dvorak on my first attempt back in July 2000. It also seems that switching to and fro between QWERTY and Colemak will be much easier than switching back and fro between QWERTY and Dvorak. You can get full instructions on how to use it, and a Windows installer, from the Colemak website. Hopefully it won’t be too long before I am good enough at it to be able to use it at work too.

Update: I didn’t eventually switch to Colemak in the end. (See discussion.)

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Posted at 20:59 on 20 June 2007.
Tagged: typing

Over the past week or so I’ve been having another go at typing Dvorak again. I’ve been getting rather frustrated recently at my long standing indiscipline and uncoordinated habits on a QWERTY layout, particularly in my right hand, and I’ve been anxious to ditch it in favour of something a bit more sane and logical for quite a while now, the problem being, of course, the amount of time and effort it takes to make the switch, and the dire impact that it has on your productivity during the first couple of weeks.

This time I think it is within my grasp, however. This is my third attempt to get Dvoraking, and I can now easily manage over 30 words per minute on my laptop, where I have rearranged the key caps. I am still a bit slower on my Kinesis keyboard which does not have the keys relabelled, so I am having to learn to touch type properly on it, and that makes it a bit more of an effort. Nevertheless, it is now at the stage at which the impact on my productivity is minor enough for it to be tolerated at work, and once you reach that stage, it is plain sailing all the way.

I am well impressed with just how much more comfortable it is than qwerty, and also that it seems to encourage and even enforce much more disciplined keyboard habits. I find that the fingers on my right hand tend to gravitate naturally to the home keys for their resting position now, for instance, whereas on qwerty they tended to gravitate to anything but the home keys. I am also finding it much easier to type without having my palms resting on the wrist rests at the front of the keyboard all the time.

One thing I have found however is that if you frequently have to remote desktop into other computers and servers, a reprogrammable keyboard is absolutely essential. Terminal Services uses the keyboard layout programmed into the server rather than your local machine, so unless you are prepared to switch back and forth all the time between qwerty and Dvorak (and everything that I have read on the subject is unanimous that you shouldn’t while you’re learning), relying on the ability to change the keyboard settings in Windows simply won’t cut the mustard. The keyboard switcher in Windows can be pretty temperamental at the best of times, and nice as it would be to switch all the servers I access to Dvorak, there are other people around who also have to log in as an administrator as well as me, and if they end up typing gibberish or are unable to even log in thanks to the Dvorak layout, they are likely to get rather annoyed.

It seems that there are quite a few alpha geeks and bloggers who type Dvorak. Well known Dvorakists include Bittorrent inventor Bram Cohen and WordPress head honcho Matt Mullenweg. For a light-hearted and entertaining look at the benefits of the Dvorak keyboard layout, check out DVZine.org, a Dvorak advocacy site in web comic format. It’s a seriously cool intro to it that is well worth a read, even if you don’t plan to switch.

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Posted at 20:35 on 8 June 2007.
Tagged: typing

There is a bug in the newly released Windows Live Writer beta 2 that causes it to choke if you are also using Bad Behavior on your blog.

I first discovered this when I installed it yesterday to check it out. When it refused to update the theme from my blog, I wondered at first if there was a problem with my custom theme, but then half an hour later I looked at my home page again to find that all the comments on my blog had closed. A quick investigation showed that Bad Behavior had been choking on the requests from Windows Live Writer and logging the failed attempts, which were then being picked up by my new plugin, Three Strikes and You’re Out.

It turns out that the problem stems from the fact that Bad Behavior expects Internet Explorer to include an “Accept” header with every HTTP request, and if it gets something that claims to be Internet Explorer yet doesn’t match up to its expectation, it throws an error.

Fortunately, it is not too difficult to fix this, though you do need to tweak the code base of Bad Behavior. Open the file msie.php in the bad-behavior subdirectory of your Bad Behavior plugin and find the lines which say:

if (!array_key_exists('Accept', $package['headers_mixed'])) {
    return "17566707";
}

Change this to read as follows:

if (strpos($package['headers_mixed']['User-Agent'], "Windows Live Writer")
    === FALSE && !array_key_exists('Accept', $package['headers_mixed'])) {
    return "17566707";
}

You should then be able to use Windows Live Writer on your blog once again, without losing the protection offered by the Bad Behavior plugin.

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Posted at 08:33 on 5 June 2007.
Tagged: wordpress

The first alpha versions of my new WordPress comment plugins are now available for download.

Comment Timeout 2.0 closes comments on posts on your blog a certain time after they are posted. It has been rebuilt from the ground up to incorporate some new features:

• You can now override the default settings to allow certain posts to have the discussion kept open for a shorter or longer time, or even indefinitely.
• You can define a “popularity level” above which the discussion can be kept open for an even longer period of time if you so desire.
• You can have comments on older posts sent to the moderation queue instead of closing the discussion altogether.
• The comment form now indicates when the discussion for a particular post will close.

Some features were added to version 1.3 but have now been spun off into two separate plugins:

Three Strikes and You’re Out examines your Bad Behavior logs and your spam queue and closes comments across the board on your blog when you are visited from any IP addresses that have been repeatedly misbehaving (the default settings are three times in a week). It also defines a couple of hooks and adds a new logging table to the database, so other plugins can register naughty events (e.g. failed captcha tests) or override the counting mechanism (e.g. to implement whitelists or blacklists).

Link Limits rejects comments which contain BBCode or more than two normal hyperlinks. I’ve found that this blocks approximately 80% of spam, yet genuine comments exceeding these limits are almost non-existent. It informs your commenters that this restriction is in place. It also logs any violations to Three Strikes And You’re Out, but it works perfectly well if you do not have Three Strikes And You’re Out installed.

I’ve marked them all as “alpha 1″ status, which means use at your own risk, though I am dogfooding them on my own blog. If you have any problems with them, I’ve written a post on how to report problems with WordPress plugins — please read it before giving me a shout, though I do welcome feedback and suggestions of course.

Starting with these plugins, I have changed the licensing terms. Whereas the old versions were GPL, these ones are available under the MIT X11 licence. It is GPL compatible but doesn’t have the “copyleft” element. This means that if you wanted to, you could adapt it for use with another, non-GPL, CMS or blog program.

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Posted at 23:28 on 3 June 2007.
Tagged: wordpress