While trying to downgrade my laptop from Vista to XP (Vista is still, even with SP1, just not ready) using the ‘XP recovery disc’ that Sony gave me, I kept getting an error upon trying to boot into the DVD. The following is a transcript of what must have been quite an ordeal for the tech support guys to wrap their narrow little minds around.

Almost forgot to mention that there were five to ten minute pauses between responses. These people couldn’t have been able to type any faster than 5wpm or something. Or maybe they were spending too much time with the troubleshooting manual. Either way, you could see my patience disappear pretty quickly. (more…)

Based on my last post, I was wondering if it might be possible to do something about the keys on my current keyboard while I wait for my new one, so I dug around a bit and came up with a few interesting things that are somewhat related to the topic.

Microsoft has a neat little tool called the Keyboard Layout Creator, which allows one to create a new keyboard layout [brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department]. What is a keyboard layout? It changes the keys around for you, so your Z key could be your Y key — which they do in some European countries as I discovered on my trip last year. How could this possibly help my typing efficiency? Well I’m not talking about Dvorak… yet.

I’m just thinking of some simple tweaks like turning off the caps lock button. I can’t tell you how many times I’m flying allong and hit that thing by ACCIDENT EVERY TIME i GO FOR THE ‘a’ KEY. It’s rather annoying to look up from something you’re transcribing to notice that you’re going to have to start over. But if we go that far, why not make a few more changes?

The { and } are very frequently used in the C languages (which are what I deal with primarily), and it can be a bit of a pain to hit them with some accuracy because I’m always having to reach for the shift key at the same time. So I inverted the keys. Now it’s { and } normally, and when pressed with the shift key they are [ and ]. This spawned yet another idea, why not invert all the numerical keys above the alphas, which I almost never use because I’m so used to typing my numbers in on the right-side keypad. It hasn’t taken much for me to get used to this system… just a couple minutes into a coding session, and I was nearly at my top speed… I’m wondering if I’ll eventually get faster than I am normally… or if I’ll work on another machine and forget what a normal setup is like — this should be limmited as I’m switching keyboard layouts only when I’m coding.

If you’d like to try this out yourself, I’ve put up some directions and a link to download my layout drivers.

I’ve finally had it with my keyboard. It’s frustrating the hell out of me, it’s stiff, it’s laid out horribly and the wireless feature is unreliable at best. As a coder, who sits in front of the computer for more than 8 hours every day, I don’t need that sort of frustration.

For starters, my Microsoft Wireless Desktop Elite Keyboard, has the function keys at the top remapped to ‘more functional’ things like undo, redo, new, open, close, etc. Hate to tell you this MS, but you seriously need to give us geeks a way to turn that crap off. I can’t count the times that I’ve gone to compile in Visual Studios and my email client loaded! ~OR~ on more than one occasion I’ve moved or deleted a bunch of files and, needing to rename a remaining file or directory, hit the ‘edit’ shortcut key (F2)… only to find all the moved/deleted files return… M$ in it’s infinite wisdom has remapped the F2 key to be the undo key — the ‘edit’ functionality of the F2 key was, need I remind you, their idea to begin with! So, with this keyboard, unless I remember to hit the Function Lock key every time I boot up, I’m screwed!

And, after turning the Function Lock off, keys that would normally be used have been inverted. For example: I can no longer use the PrintScreen button as it’s suddenly the insert key! What the hell happened to putting the insert key next to the delete key? Stupid M$. I’d kill the idiot who laid this thing out.

To make matters worse, this wireless keyboard decides to cut out on occasion, and skip a few keys. It’s making my typing accuracy (and thus my efficiency) terrible because I’m preempting the impossible to predict errors that are about to happen. I’d like to press a key and have the character appear on the screen every time, not just randomly. Thanks.

To top it all off, the keys are horrendously small and stiff (get yer mind outta the gutter), and make my hands ache after only a few hours of use even though I have no problem with laptop keyboard keys, except that the smaller form factor makes my back hurt after sitting in front of it for 12 to 16 hours of hard core coding.

Finally frustrated with my typing situation, and seeing has how I spend my working career using a keyboard 99.9% of the time — who has time to reach for the mouse? — I decided it was high time to start looking for an alternative solution to my problem.

After weeks of looking through possible candidates, I’ve come up with the Das Keyboard II (’The Keyboard’ in German). It’s the geeks holy grail of keyboards. Expensive, but from the looks of it, well worth the extra cost. It’s got mechanical switches like my old OmniKey Ultra (my first IBM computer keyboard and considered the Cadillac of keyboards), but doesn’t cost as much as the Stellar, and has the simplest layout I can find in an upper end keyboard. It’s so simple in fact that they haven’t printed the characters on the keys! It’s marketed toward the UberGeek, and I can see why. Only someone who’s put in the hours at a keyboard can know it well enough to use it and appreciate the quality of a mechanical keyboard — membrane keyboards feel mushy to me, and when they try to make it not mushy, they make it too stiff. And this one’s wired, so no missing keys anymore… just my typos.

So, there ya have it. That’s why I’ve spent $80 bucks on a blank keyboard. Not because it’ll make me look cool, (which it most certainly will do ;)) but because my frustration has driven me to it.

Now this is just plain cool. It’s straight out of a Neal Stephenson book! Here’s the link to the dude’s site if anybody is interested in participating.

Cristi turned me on to yet another distraction offered up by the internet: while it’s in its beta phase, MyHeritage.com is allowing for uploads of photos to be compared to a database of over 3200 celebrities. At first I tried uploading a few pics of myself that I had on hand just to see what would come up. I’ve never been told that I look like any celebrity, and aparently my special, overly-attractive combo of features don’t add up for the server either.

So, as a test I decided to d/l a few photos of celebrities that are in the database, just to see how close this thing really was. After, accidentally uploading the exact photo of Reese Witherspoon and getting an 80% hit on their copy, I realized that the system was heavily dependent upon color saturation and brightness of the photo. It knocked 20% off because my copy was a little darker and saturated.

So I tried a head-shot of Meg Ryan. Dead on. 76%, and my copy wasn’t in the DB.

Then a shot of Laetitia Casta (who is this woman anyway?) with her head slightly down-turned, but still centered toward the camera. The results were a little odd. It returned several results, all of which were 75% and up, and all of which had the models face slightlyturned downward, but none of which were Ms. Casta. Sorta reminds me of a funny story that I heard a while back from a Commo Sgt. when I was in the Army:

The Army, for years, has been working on a computer that would automatically identify an enemy vehicle, by sight, using fuzzy logic. This could help in reducing friendly-fire, where we would accidentally fire upon one of our own tanks.

The system worked very much like this website. They fed a bunch of photos into the database of enemy and allied tanks and trucks from various angles. And when they fed additional photos, not in the database, into the recognition program they got perfect results… EVERY TIME… even when the vehicle could’nt be identified by a human. Which was basically impossible. Excited, the scientists hooked the computer up to a video camera and took it out into the field, which is where the proverbial shit hit the fan.

When the camera was pointed at a vehicle it seemed to almost randomly pick whether it was enemy or allied. Confused the scientists tried feeding the old photos back into the system… and got perfect results. So, being good little trouble shooters, they fed new photos into the system… and again got screwy results.

It turns out that all of the original shots of the enemy tanks were taken on an overcast day whereas the pics for the allied vehicles were taken on a sunny day. They built a computer that could descern, not the difference between enemy and ally, but between clouds and blue sky!

So the moral to this story? Aparently, those scientist found work elsewhere after the Army was done with them.