james mckay dot net

Can somebody please explain to me why the pointy-haired bosses in the Scottish transport office have a fetish for ridiculously low speed limits at roadworks? It’s down to thirty miles an hour on the motorway leading up to the Forth Road Bridge and ten miles an hour on a stretch of the A90 a few miles south of Aberdeen.

I’ve never encountered speed limits that low in comparable situations south of the border, but then again there are other factors at play back home. The sheer volume of traffic on the M25 reduces things to a complete crawl at times, for instance.

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Posted at 00:30 in Miscellany

I’ve now been typing in Dvorak for about six weeks, and it finally seems to have clicked. This is my fourth attempt, and this time it all slotted into place after about two weeks. Unlike my previous attempt, this time I have had no discomfort, probably because I am using my Kinesis keyboard almost exclusively now both at work and at home, and avoiding flat keyboards like the plague.

I wouldn’t claim to be the world’s fastest typist yet, but it has certainly improved my keyboard discipline. I am now at last able to touch type properly in a way that I was never able to do on qwerty, for starters, and this in turn means that I am finally getting the most out of my Kinesis contoured keyboard. It’s also fun to see people’s reactions when they try to use my keyboard and find that not only are they confused by the shape of the thing, it doesn’t give them the letters that they expect. Hehe…

One thing I have found however is that while Dvorak is a definite improvement for text, the difference is smaller when you are programming, particularly in a curly-brackety language like C# or JavaScript, since you are making much more use of numbers and symbols. Having said that, a lot of what you have to do as a programmer involves writing text — comments, specs and the like — so it is still an improvement anyway.

I decided in the end not to bother with any of the other alternative layouts. I briefly tried Colemak, and while my initial impressions were favourable, I came to the conclusion in the end that its advantages over Dvorak are too small to be worth bothering with. It seemed to work relatively well on a flat laptop keyboard but for some reason I found it no easier to get to grips with on my Kinesis than Dvorak.

There are actually several qwerty derivatives knocking about, and the main thing that makes Colemak different from, say, Asset or Arensito is its small but noisy fanboy community. Its Wikipedia article was deleted back in November on the grounds of non-notability and has since been protected to prevent re-creation, much to the disgust of the fanboys. Yeah, there was the CapsOff million dollar competition, but it seems that was an obscure affair where it turns out that the prize money was entirely funded by donations. Given that the CapsOff website says that they would list all donations on the website, and I couldn’t find any listed anywhere, it seems that Colemak won its designer a lot less than the touted million dollars by a very large margin. Sure, it may become more popular, but I’ve already put in enough effort switching to Dvorak, so I think I’ll give it a miss for now.

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Posted at 13:03 in Miscellany

A couple of years ago, I registered two new Internet domain names, jammy cakes.com and jammy cakes.net. It’s an anagram of my name, and a handle that I use on various developer forums and places like Wikipedia, so I thought I might as well go for it since they were available at the time.

In the end of the day, I never used them, and they’ve just sat around doing nothing, so I’ve decided to sell them. They could be of some value if you are in the food industry and are selling, um, jammy cakes.

It will be interesting to see how much they fetch. They are pretty SEO friendly for the purpose, so they could be worth a bit, but as they are pretty much unused, they don’t get all that much traffic, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Oh, and before you ask: (a) I am not getting into the domain name squatting business — these are the only two that I have to spare, and (b) jamesmckay.net is most definitely not for sale!

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Posted at 13:30 in Miscellany

The latest version of Comment Timeout 2.0 is now available. It fixes a bug that was letting comments from spam bots through on older posts. If you are using version 2.0 alpha 1 you should upgrade.

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Posted at 18:32 in WordPress plugins

It seems that scarcely a week goes by these days without someone launching Yet Another Social Networking Site. There are more of them knocking around these days than you can shake a stick at: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, Bebo, Jaiku, Wayn, Twitter, Second Life, LiveJournal, meetup.com … the list goes on.

Pownce is one of the latest newcomers, and I got an invite for it just before Faith Camp. It was founded by various Web 2.0 entrepreneurs including Kevin Rose of Digg fame and launched about a month or so ago with great fanfare. Its purpose, as it says on the home page, is to “send stuff to your friends”:

Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You’ll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast.

Right. So what exactly does it do that you can’t already do with a combination of MSN Messenger and either Facebook or MySpace?

It seems that your home page on Pownce shows the latest things that you and all your friends have posted on the site, so to make the most of it you need to have a network of friends who are using it. Visually, it looks pretty slick, and the concept seems similar in some ways to Twitter, but it still seems a bit pointless to me.

Social networking sites can absorb a lot of your time if you let them. You can spend hours on Facebook alone, and with a plethora of new ones on the scene it can be hard to keep track of all of them. However, most of my friends only make regular use of the biggest, best known and most useful ones: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, and maybe one or two others.

I wonder a bit if Web 2.0 is reaching saturation point somewhat. Or is it just another sign of the times we live in, where just as society re-invents itself every fortnight, the latest and greatest Internet phenomenon is a constantly and rapidly moving target?

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Posted at 14:08 in Miscellany