What the Happy Hacking Keyboard should have been

The Quest for the Perfect Hacking Keyboard is indeed an eternal one. Over the years, I had great many keyboards and most of them went the way of the dodo. Recently, despite not having other Apple products, I tried the (wired) thin Apple aluminum keyboard. As I prefer very thin keyboard over thick ones, and laptop-style keys to the big M Type keys; it was a very good match. However, after a while, I got unnerved by the extra, useless keypad. In short, the keyboard is too long: as I am right handed, it’s always somehow in the way of the mouse so I started looking for a better keyboard. Again.

So I got the Apple aluminium keyboard, wireless version.

Your Automatisms Betray You

Yesterday someone dropped on the IRC channel where my fellow programmers, computer enthusiasts, and I hang out to get help to find a bug. He uses one of the paste sites (like pastebin.ca, pastebin.com, or rafb.net), pastes his piece of offending code, and so we get a look at the code. Of course, I go over the short program, notice a mistake in the scanf but it took me a full two minutes to notice the loop:

for (c=0; c++; cwe don’t read what’s actually written, but what we think is written, unless we pay the utmost attention to the code—what we should be doing anyway, but do not always. Usually, you zero in on that kind of bug rapidly, as you guide your search from the bug’s symptoms which leads you to defect’s approximate location. If you’re like me—write a little, test a lot—you find those bugs right away most of the times. However, even if you zero in rapidly, you still get a coarse-grained location: module, class, function.

Suggested Reading: The Design Of Everyday Things

Donald A. Norman — The Design Of Everyday Things — Basic Books, 2002, 257 pp. ISBN 0-465-06710-7

(buy at Amazon.com)

In the same lineage than Machine Beauty, this books explores the fundamental rules of good design. Built around the following seven precepts, Norman lays out the problems (and solutions) to good design:

• Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head
• Simplify the structure of tasks
• Make things visible: offer feedbacks for actions
• Get the mappings right
• Exploit the contraints, both natural and artificial
• Design for error
• When all else fail, standardize

The book is filled with examples of each principle. Fully annotated and with numerous references, this book (although a bit aged) will serve as a good introduction to the subject, especially for people interested in the design of user interfaces (while, however, the books is not very concerned about computers as the original edition was written in the late 80s).

To read with Machine Beauty, User Interface Design for Programmers, and The Inmates are Running the Asylum.

Music to Code to

If you’re anything like me, you like to create a musical bubble to isolate you from your surroundings and being able to concentrate on what you actually have to do. To do so, I have amassed a rather long list of dub, trance, techno mixes. Some are 90 minutes long, and are very well crafted. People who think that techno is always the same (boom-tss-boom-tss) are clearly missing something.

I have bought numerous CDs over the years, but it turns out that there are a lot of (legal, DRM-free) free podcasts out there, and while they’re not all easy to find, they’re easy to share. Here are the few I d/l recently:

The Zoolook Project has several podcasts of ambient, trance, hard techno, etc., mixes. Amongst which I like:

• Révélations
• Somptuaire

There’s also the T.O.U.C.H. Samadhi website that offers both streaming and pod casts. A bit wierder, maybe. I like:

• SOT: Alpha Site
• DJ NOD live at tetragrammatrance 2

Other personnal favorites include the DJ LNG mixes found at DJ LNG (aka Romalong)‘s page. Especially Random Regularity.

Happy hacking, then!

Suggested Reading: Zen Cat

Judith Adler, Paul Coughlin —Zen Cat— Rodale, 2003, 112 pp. ISBN 0-8759-6923-2

(Buy at Amazon.com)

I love all solitary places, where we taste the pleasure of believing what we see is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

— Percy Bysshe Shelly

The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes

— Frank Lloyd Wright

This short book cointains about sixty short proverbs, quotations, sayings and poems, each accompagnied by an à propos picture of a cat. As many poetry books, to be read in a meditative mood.