A weird thing: in Firefox, text fields are working with Colemak, but keyboard shortcuts are still QWERTY. I'm effectively hitting cmd-G to open new tabs, instead of cmd-T. I wonder why that is.
It's hard for me to code (or do anything that requires concentration) while listening to wonderful awesome distracting music. Especially if both the music and the activity use language (I can listen to singing and play solitaire, or I can listen to instrumental and write stuff; I cannot listen to singing and write stuff (and I get bored if I listen to instrumental and play solitaire)).
Some people in the XKCD forum put me on to the streaming music at Blue Mars. I like what I've heard so far, though I know basically nothing about lyricless/ambient music (recommend stuff!).
They have three streams, "Blue Mars", "Cryosleep", and "Voices From Within". I've been listening to Cryosleep. Voices From Within seems to be in a lot of random languages (good glossolalia stuff perhaps??).
It's nice to have some music going on in the background. Whee pretty sounds, and it's calming. And somewhat surprisingly, very focusing as well. Not just because it keeps me from hearing every little random thing in the house -- it puts me in some kind of zone.
Good debugging music, on the other hand, is apparently all the happymaking energetic fast stuff that I totally can't listen to while producing the code in the first place. Will see how that goes when I actually have something frustrating to debug.
I've been reading the O'Reilly Learning Python book online. (I love institutional subscriptions!) It's an excellent book, but it can't seem to decide whether to be aimed at programmers or non-programmers. It goes into detail about really basic general-programming things like how a while loop works and where you might want to use one. Then it throws a bunch of jargon at you. The exercises are easy, but there are awfully few of them. I'm digging up lots of random exercises on the internet. (Perhaps the author assumes the reader is an expert, and has their own exercises/problems/projects in mind already??)
Maybe this weirdness is just a product of me being in a weird place: I sort of remember how to program from HS classes, but not very well, and I certainly don't remember language specifics. So "rank beginner" tutorials are too easy, and "expert" tutorials are way too hard.
Oddly enough, I find that studying Python whets my appetite for Scheme and SICP. Not that Python is ugly or anything -- but Scheme/SICP is beautiful. Mm, rigor and abstraction and such things.
So I finally did get sick of just sitting around reading all day every day, and started learning Scheme. I didn't remember everything from the Scheme class I took in high school, but I thought I remembered enough to use a tutorial that didn't hold my hand. On Raffi's recommendation, I started with Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days. It's pretty concise and explains things clearly, but it's not for someone who doesn't know how to program.
While writing random code snippets, I ran into things I didn't remember how to do (as opposed to syntax I couldn't understand; the tutorial was excellent). So now I'm rereading Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs, aka the blue wizard book. And this time I'm actually reading almost everything, and doing the exercises. (It's the same book we used in high school, but that was senior year, and the class was experimental, and Mr. Thibodeaux was amazingly easygoing, so after a while we all stopped doing the reading. *shame shame*)
I got Firefox 3 a while ago, and while I haven't really used the most-hyped features yet, there are a lot of little things I like.
Right-click on a tab and you get a couple menu options I've really been missing: move the tab to a new window, copy the tab to a new window, and move the tab to [choose an other existing window]. Sweet! ETA: Whoops, this isn't a native feature, it's an add-on called Tab To Window that I forgot I had. It's very much worth getting.
They fixed it so that ctrl-W and ctrl-T do the Right Things. With no windows open, ctrl-T opens a new window, instead of doing nothing. And if you have it set so the tab bar is always open, you don't need shift-ctrl-W to close a window that has only one tab in it.
Unfortunately, if you have a Mac you still have to jump through hoops to get favicons (those little website icons) in your bookmarks toolbar. Blahhh.
I haven't really gotten around to using the awesomebar (smart location bar) to its maximum, but what I've seen so far is pretty shiny. I'm hardcore into keywords and keyword searches, so I don't really need the awesomebar. Nothing beats typing "l" for my LJ friends page, or typing "w shakespeare" and getting the Wikipedia page for Shakespeare. Well, nothing except typing "e to the i pi" and getting the Wikipedia page for Euler's Identity.
[This was written by my good friend Raffi. Note that it takes place at U. of Western Ontario, not MIT. I'm reposting it here with permission, for a couple of different reasons -- see note at end.]
(1) I tried these about:config edits to make Firefox run faster, and they seem to have worked splendidly. I can't tell if the application opens faster, which was my original intent, but it certainly opens pages a hell of a lot faster -- LJ in particular is much faster, and even Gmail is a bit faster.
(2) Gmail is highly featureful but kind of slow to load. Does anyone know of a fast text-based email client that does the organizing-messages-into-conversations thing, or has tags, or supports "owning" several addresses and sending mail from each?
(3) Woo keystroke navigation! Woo QuickSilver, which apparently makes it way easier to navigate Macs by keystroke -- I haven't learned to use it for anything but opening applications and the occasional URL, but I can already tell it's good because it does an excellent job of learning what you mean. I type `f' and hit enter, and it opens Firefox. Speaking of which, woo keywords for bookmarks and searches! Seriously. So much better than bookmarks-toolbar buttons for frequently-visited sites.
I have picked up a broken external hard drive. It is no longer intact, although it doesn't look like any parts are physically cracked or fried -- it's just been partly taken apart. I do not have the expertise to restore it to working order.
What should I do with it?
>> beg and plead for someone knowledgeable to invest time and effort in teaching me on this thing >> drop it off a roof >> take the components apart and make shiny things out of them >> your more specific suggestion here
Barring I take the first option, I do want to take the magnets out because magnets are fun. But what about everything else?
I just ran across this really neat video of Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D minor. [8:34]
What I find fascinating about it is not so much the actual technique used, although that's cool too. What I love is that this lets you see all those neat patterns that Bach was so good with -- inversions of the theme, in particular, are a lot easier to notice. Plus, you can see chord changes getting ready to happen, at the same time as your Western-music-trained auditory cortex can hear them getting ready to happen. Woo cognitive consonance. (I don't know enough about organs to know what the different colors stand for -- different stops?)
EDIT: Oh, and, after you watch it, it looks like your screen is shifting to the right. Hee.
The audio for the above is a MIDI -- admittedly a good one -- but I guess that's an unfortunate requirement of the software that makes the visualization. A more traditional rendition: http://youtube.com/watch?v=_FXoyr_…
