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Some­thing I dis­cov­ered to­day: DDvo­rak, a key­board lay­out loose­ly based on Dvo­rak which caters specif­i­cal­ly to de­vel­op­ers or pro­gram­mers. There’s a lay­out tester on the same site that mea­sures the over­all ef­fi­cien­cy of var­i­ous typ­ing lay­outs with any text that you choose.

DDvo­rak, on first glance, is a com­plete­ly unortho­dox typ­ing lay­out. It re­quires com­ma as a dead key for many sym­bols, and Alt­Gr as a mod­i­fier for many others. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, many things are moved to un­con­ven­tion­al lo­ca­tions (BackSpace is where ‘B’ is on QW­ER­TY key­boards, for ex­am­ple). How­ev­er, the lay­out tester con­sis­tent­ly mea­sures the ef­fi­cien­cy of DDvo­rak as sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than ei­ther Dvo­rak or Cole­mak, no mat­ter whether typ­ing English or code.

I think I’m go­ing to have to give DDvo­rak a try, soon, if on­ly I could fig­ure out how to rad­i­cal­ly change key­board lay­outs in X.org… of course, it’s easy with Win­dows. It wouldn’t be Win­dows if there weren’t a tool for ev­ery­thing.

What you see here is a com­put­er I just built for my­self, which was to be qui­et as pos­si­ble, while still keep­ing the ther­mal per­for­mance un­der con­trol. All of this, of course, in a ma­chine with more-than-ad­e­quate per­for­mance for gam­ing, 3D ren­der­ing, Pho­to­shop work, and video en­cod­ing. Here’s a pho­to of the fi­nal build:

uATX si­lent gam­ing build

I used a Ther­mal­take Lan­box Lite case to house this com­put­er. The ma­jor com­po­nents I se­lect­ed for this build were an In­tel Core 2 Quad, 2 GB of RAM, and an nVidia 9600 GT video card. The 9600 GT is cooled al­most-pas­sive­ly with an Arc­tic Cool­ing Ac­celero S2 cool­er, and the CPU is cooled al­most-pas­sive­ly with a Ther­mal­take Big Ty­phoon. Air ex­hausts from the sys­tem with one low-speed 60mm fan be­hind the CPU and one low-speed 60mm fan beside the video card. A 90mm PWM fan push­es air through the CPU cool­er. The thing you see in the top 5.25” slot is a Tu­niq hard drive si­lencer: it sur­rounds the hard drive with sound-block­ing but ther­mal­ly con­duc­tive foam.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, due to a stupid mis­take I made, I need to re­place the moth­er­board I orig­i­nal­ly pur­chased, so I can run the sys­tem right now… when my new one ar­rives hope­ful­ly I’ll post some screen­shots and bench­marks.

I just found out about (old news) the Star­craft 1.15.2 patch, other­wise known as the “of­fi­cial­ly-spon­sored no-CD patch”. I wish more game com­pa­nies would fol­low this ex­am­ple and re­al­ize that copy pro­tec­tion is use­less: no mat­ter how ad­vanced, gamers fig­ure out ways to avoid copy pro­tec­tion, and it just caus­es prob­lems for in­no­cent and le­git­i­mate users any­way.

On the other side of the coin, more gamers should just grow up and re­al­ize that com­pa­nies do want to get paid for mak­ing games, and that they should think about may­be pay­ing for their games ev­ery on­ce in a while. Take the ad­vice found in no-CD crack READMEs to heart: if you like this game, please con­sid­er pur­chas­ing it. If both sides of the “bat­tle” work to­geth­er, we can may­be end this ridicu­lous an­ti-con­sumer non­sense.

Still, it would be nice if more game com­pa­nies would patch their games like this. Prefer­ably a lit­tle soon­er after their game is re­leased too!

I re­cent­ly ac­quired a re­al­ly old, Celeron-class lap­top with some­thing like 128 MB of RAM and a 10 GB hard drive. It came with Win­dows ME, but I want­ed to in­stall some form of Lin­ux on it and make it at least marginal­ly use­ful, as sort of a lightweight fam­i­ly PC. I have but few goals for this ma­chine: it should be able to surf the web (no Flash nec­es­sary; would even sac­ri­fice JavaScript), it should be able to pro­cess Word doc­u­ments, and if at all pos­si­ble it should be able to run some old­er Win­dows apps us­ing Wine.

My first at­tempt at cre­at­ing such a thing came with Xubun­tu 8.04. At first I tried to use the bun­dled Fire­fox 3 and Xfce desk­top en­vi­ron­ment… but as it turned out, that was too much for the slow hard drive and pro­ces­sor of my old com­put­er. I de­cid­ed to re­place Xfce with IceWM, an old fa­vorite of mine. Sim­i­lar­ly, I re­placed Fire­fox 3 with Mi­dori, a much lighter-weight web browser based on We­bKit. I kept the Xfce ter­mi­nal em­u­la­tor though, be­cause I much prefer it to xterm and don’t want to in­stall gnome-ter­mi­nal. I al­so in­stalled iDesk to provide some prim­i­tive desk­top icons.

Read more…

Bun­dled with Gi­ga­byte moth­er­boards is a small util­i­ty called “@BIOS”, which pur­ports to have the abil­i­ty to up­date the moth­er­board BIOS from with­in Win­dows, XP or Vis­ta. A lot of “ad­vanced” com­put­er users tend to be wary of such a propo­si­tion, but Toshiba lap­top BIOS­es ac­tu­al­ly do have this func­tion­al­i­ty and it works quite well.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, Gi­ga­byte’s tool does not work as ex­pect­ed. I tried to up­date my BIOS from with­in Win­dows Vis­ta, with no other pro­grams run­ning, and the pro­gram crashed in the mid­dle of flash­ing the ROM. For­tu­nate­ly, I ex­pect­ed that my board would be dead, so I looked some stuff up on Google be­fore I re­boot­ed. Posts on some fo­rums told me that the BIOS would au­to-re­cov­er an im­age from the hard drive, so I down­load­ed Gi­ga­byte’s lat­est BIOS from their web­site and put it on the root of my drive. I was lucky; when I re­boot­ed, the BIOS found the im­age and was able to re­cov­er it­self.

Lesson learned? Avoid @BIOS like the plague.

To­day I had a prob­lem with AVG free an­ti-virus (my fa­vorite free an­ti-virus soft­ware, by the way). The up­dater com­po­nent told me that “a .bin file is missing”, a prob­lem which I could not solve my­self. So I searched on Google for it, and lo! the top en­try is a fo­rum post ex­plain­ing that it’s just a tem­po­rary prob­lem with AVG’s up­dates and should be fixed to­mor­row…

Wait a sec­ond, a tem­po­rary prob­lem that should be fixed to­mor­row? I checked the date on the post, and it was from to­day. I knew that Google had a lot of dis­tribut­ed com­put­ing re­sources… but be­ing able to find and in­dex posts, giv­ing them rea­son­able PageR­anks on the day that they ap­pear?

I have now de­vel­oped an en­tire­ly new re­spect for the pow­er of Google.

Down­load crarchive ver­sion 0.1.

Here’s a lit­tle pro­gram I wrote to solve a small prob­lem I’ve been hav­ing with cron. Say one has in one’s crontab the fol­low­ing line:

0 0 * * * /usr/bin/rsync -avz dir1/ /back­up/dir1/

This backs up dir1 to a back­up di­rec­to­ry. rsync, how­ev­er, cre­ates a lot of out­put (espe­cial­ly with the -v switch)… and cron sends that out­put to your email, so ev­ery day, you’ll be get­ting an email mes­sage from cron with the re­sults of the back­up. To avoid this, most peo­ple sim­ply redi­rect the out­put to /dev/null. What if I do ac­tu­al­ly want to see the out­put though, just not in my in­box? Read more…

I de­cid­ed to write this re­view to share my own ex­pe­ri­ence of buy­ing a track­ball mouse: I had been com­par­ing be­tween what are ba­si­cal­ly the two most full-fea­tured track­balls on the mar­ket to­day, the Log­itech Cord­less Op­ti­cal Track­Man and the Kens­ing­ton Ex­pert Mouse 7.0. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, track­balls are not very pop­u­lar among com­put­er users to­day, and so I had a very hard time find­ing an Ex­pert Mouse to try out for my own. In the end, one of my friends owned the Log­itech track­ball and a dif­fer­ent (non-op­ti­cal) Kens­ing­ton track­ball pro­duct, and I end­ed up buy­ing the Ex­pert Mouse. To sum up this en­tire re­view, I am ex­treme­ly hap­py with my pur­chase; read on for my rea­sons.

Kens­ing­ton Ex­pert Mouse 7.0

Wel­come to the new Non­graph­i­cal.com! Ob­vi­ous­ly, I’ve made a lot of changes here. It’s a whole new de­sign with a whole new back­end. I sup­pose I should say that it’s al­so a whole new blog. I’ll be writ­ing re­views, most­ly on what I con­sid­er use­ful tech. I’ll al­so be pub­lish­ing ar­ti­cles and tu­to­ri­als on topics I can’t find else­where.

And hey, if you like this, let me de­sign some­thing like it for you! I do styles, PHP and Python pro­gram­ming, and al­so work with third-par­ty apps (like Word­Press). I al­so try for 100% valid XHTML and CSS. Check out my port­fo­lio for more in­for­ma­tion.