Technology
Technology
Some of the finer points of my tech-religion zealotry can be found below.
Dvorak Keyboard
When I first started working i noticed that my fingers would hurt at the end of the day from the amount of typing I was doing. I had heard about the Dvorak keyboard layout a few years back so, one long weekend in 2001, I decided to try it out.
So I tried it out and my fingers did not hurt at the end of the day. Eventually, (about 2 weeks later) I achived my same old level of 75wpm. I can’t say that Dvorak has made me a faster typist, but I would say that I am more comfortable. I’m currently typing somewhere in the lower 90s wpm and wouldn’t contemplate going back. If you’re interested in making the switch, you can follow the Dvorak link in the top navigation menu.
My Powerbook 15” MacBook Pro
Like many of a growing group of Unix users, I have come under the full sway of the Macintosh operating system. In early 2002 I bought the 17” iMac for experimentation purposes. It wasn’t long until later that year I replaced it a G4 Powerbook. In May of 2007 I upgraded to a MacBook Pro 2.2 GhZ with 4 gig RAM onboard. It is truly *snappy*.
This is the first computer i have ever possessed which makes using it a real joy. I really enjoy the way it feels, the way it works, the way it smells even. It gives me the ability to do everything Unix I like plus gives me access to great applications for processing movies, digital pictures — everything it’s just great and It Just Works.
I like it so much more than Windows. The greatest thing about any designed technology ( be that a teapot or a forklift ) is that the tool doesn’t get in the way of your intention to do something. When was the last time Windows did that for you?
Linux
First things first, if you’re using a PC (this excludes Macs), I recommend you use Linux (BSD or any other *IX variant is OK too).
I was very impressed with Ubuntu last I looked.
Ion
I hate using the mouse (a.k.a. rodent, a.k.a the rat) and finally someone of similar sensibility has made a window manager for X11 which allows your fingers to stay on the home row (as God intended).
Tuomo Valkonen has created Ion to fulfill this need. Ion incorporates the visual tiling of windows like Emacs (split either in half horizontal or half vertical), makes these frames keyboard resizable, is lightweight, and fast.
If you’re someone addicted to graphic fluff then ion may not be for you. If you’re a SysAdmin or a *IX power user who has transcended the need for a graphics intensive desktop you’ll want to try ion out.
I really like ion because it reminds me of my first Internet account [envision 1993] - a dial in shell on the dubious ‘cypher.com’. I can remember dialing in, launching a GNU screen program and then spinning off off an IRC process, an ‘elm’ email program process, a lynx (text-based web browser) process, a tin newsreader process, and keeping myself up all hours of the night. The internet was very cool once. Its become something else entirely now.
Mutt
My preferred reader on Linux is Mutt. Mutt is a console-based reader that can be customized to kingdom come. It’s also Open Source software. You should really try it out! It also features integration with cryptography.
Since I moved to the Mac back in 2002, I’ve been rather pleased with the Apple Mail client though.
It’s enough for my needs, although when I’m connecting from home over the VPN I love the speedy experience of mutt.
Text Editors
If you spend any time in Linux you’re going to need a text editor. The best editor, in my opinion, is emacs. Emacs was created in 1976 by Richard M. Stallman and shows an amazingly cool idea: EXTENSIBILITY. The reason it’s still popular (some 20+ years later) is that you can add new features into it quite easily using the LISP language.
It’s also interesting philosophically, The editor boasts multiple buffer support, an interesting philosophy of how to deal with a text visually,(layout wise or metasyntactically), and more add-ons than you can shake a stick at. It rocks.
In the earliest versions of this page, I made some disparaging remarks about ‘vi’ in this section. ‘Vi’ is the Coke (or Pepsi) to ‘Emacs’ Coke (or Pepsi). I decided to try a walk on the other side and have used vi’s snazzier grandson “vim” for about a year now. Both emacs and vim have their pluses and minuses. I think that Emacs is a better platform to extend into new things via plugins or to edit Lisp, but I like vim’s simplicity and speed. These a-days I say go with what works for you.
On the Mac now I’m currently using Allan Odgaard’s excellent Textmate. I may have talked about extensibility up there with emacs, but I must say Allan’s project is highly extensible and you can really churn out a lot of text very quickly with it. If you’re on MacOS i highly recommend it.
I think that part of the reason that I also got into vim was that on the Mac the command key (which i had grown used to as being the Meta key in emacs) is used for a host of other functions. To this end, using vim (which uses ESC as its key for important changes) was less confusing. My friend Pat also pointed out that the hands of 20-year emacs veterans looked like garbage because of the weird stretches it requires of the hands…that was some food for thought.
Bourne Again Shell (Bash)
If you spend time in an *IX environment, you’re going to come to love the power and tools available from the Command Line. My preferred shell is BASH. It’s Free software too, has emacs style keybindings, and is the Linux ‘default’ shell.
Cocoa
I’ve spent a lot of 2006 getting a hang of the Cocoa programming language. Cocoa is a set of frameworks ( handly tools to help developers do common tasks ) that are accessible using the Objective - C programming language. It’s a really interesting language because instead of just writing code all the time, you basically “draw pictures” to describe the behavior, and then write code to fill in the gap. It’s very interesting.
Perl
Perl (Wikipedia,Perl Home) is the programming language that holds the web together. I have tools listed on this site that were written in Perl. It’s fantastic stuff. It’s alos philosophically interesting from a linguistic / syntax perspective. Its creator is an amateur linguist so a lot of the literature on the matter makes reference to de Sasseurian terminology and linguistics.
As of 2006 I have given up on Perl as anything more than a glue language. I find it really hard to maintain as time goes by. I’ve moved to Ruby.
Ruby
My new preferred language for development is Ruby. It’s got all of the fun of Perl but is easy to read, can be sensibly maintained, and has a real knack for making its syntax clear to those who have never even written a line of code.
The “killer app” for Ruby is, of course, Rails. My blog chronicles my experiments learning Rails, feel free to consult it for more innformation.
I also run the Austin area meetup.com Ruby group.
iPod
Well what sort of music-loving computer guy would I be if I didn’t have an iPod. I originally bought it for when i was commuting from San Francisco to San Jose via public transportation. An iPod was essential for something to listen to in the train and was an absolute sanity-saver for the Light-Rail system in San Jose. You see that pokey piece of garbage has to announce every stop that it makes with this very annoying (bing “Now Approaching stop_name” bing) narration of the stops.
I take it to the gym, play it in the car, play it in other peoples’ cars - it’s one of the best inventions in recent memory.
