Dev::Blog

Inspired by Michael’s efforts to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout, I’ve decided to try learning the QWERTY layout. Yes, QWERTY. See, I took a keyboarding class in high school (taught by, appropriately enough, Ms. Keyes), but it never really “took,” and while I can still do it, my skill level is about the same as if I were to say, try to get directions in Quebec.

The math is compelling - if I can type, say, 40 words per minute with 6 fingers, I should be able to hit at least 66 wpm if I use all 10. With the amount of typing I do each day, I could use the time savings. Of course, it remains to be seen how useful it is when typing C# or HTML, but we’ll see.

So to get started, I downloaded the trial of TypingMaster and I’m doing the drills when I need a break or I’m waiting on a compile or download or whatever. It looks like I get really sloppy after 3 minutes or so of drills, but the drills are interesting, with a lot of letter combinations I don’t use very often, which might deprogram my personal AutoText system…

Current speed (on drills): 35 wpm gross, 24 wpm net (after errors accounted for)

Technorati Tags: keyboarding

So when 8 of the top 10 song downloads on Yahoo Music are from the same artist, does that mean that 1) the act is the hottest thing ever, 2) sales volume at Yahoo’s a bit on the low side and anyone can be a bestselling artist, or 3) the ranking code needs a bit of a tweak?

Combinations of the above are, of course, possible.

Technorati Tags: Music, music downloads

Just signed up with IMified - they let you interact with a bunch of online services over instant messenger. While I don’t use most of the systems enough to bother, one thing I do need is a simple bare bones to do list system, and I don’t want to have to remember another URL and login.

As luck would have it, IMified has a basic set of organizational tools built in. including to do list management. The interface is basically a set of menus, and you drill into them with successive messages back and forth.

But enough about IMified - it’s just that it happens to be a perfect example of how a multiple message SMS (mobile phone text message, natch) session would work. The next time I have to put one of those together, I’m making a bot to prototype it and hopefully leave in the wild once things go live (except for premium rate (pay) SMS I guess). It’s a great way to get the message (sorry) across to clients without having to explain how to send a text in the first place, though granted, you’d probably have to do it in front of them, as I imagine the number of chatters at that level are about the same as the number of (non-BlackBerry) texters…

Technorati Tags: IMified, SMS, mobile

I got a WTF in the mail yesterday:

We recently noticed that you may have had trouble using your password to sign in and administer your site.

We’ve fixed a glitch that affected your account, and have temporarily reset your password to “123456″.

Please log in to your site and reset your password to something that only you will remember.

It had the look of a form letter, so it appears like there’s a good chance that I now know a significant number of passwords for this service. Of course, the login is the email address, so I’d have to know that, but for this particular site I don’t think it’d be too hard to figure a few out… Guys, a simple “click here to get a link that’ll take you to a reset password page” would’ve probably done the job a little better…

Oh, and when I did log in? It took me 5 minutes to find the place where I change my password.

Web 3.0 is gonna be all about openness. No passwords for anything, I tell you.

I finally made it to a DemoCamp at No Regrets! I missed a few in the summer, largely because I didn’t feel like going out to King West. Of course, I had to wait until a freezing cold day with strong wind to brave the trek, and predictably, I got off the streetcar too early (hint: if you’re going West, it’s after the bridge. A few stops after).

I love No Regrets.

The venue was a lot smaller than MARS, but the fact that we didn’t have to move from the demo to the bar was huge, with much less drop off at the end of the talks. It’s also a bar where most people are standing up, which makes it a lot easier to join conversations. I must have talked to 20 people last night about all kinds of projects.

OK, the demos!

• Dave Humphrey gave a talk about Teaching Mozilla Development. I misunderstood (because I didn’t really prepare or even read anything ahead of time) and thought it would be about how to contribute to Mozilla, and that did get covered a bit, but it was more interesting to see the wide range of contributions his students have been adding to the system. Mozilla is the kind of app where at first glance I think it’d be pretty closed to additions with a clear path going forward and established contributors, but Dave really showed me how wrong I was.
• Alec Saunders (?) from Iotum demoed his Talk Now application for the Blackberry. I’m always stoked to see mobile apps get demo’d (Alec used a webcam of some sort to display the phone screens), but this app confused me a bit - it’s something so people can signal if they’re available to talk or not, but it’s being deployed on the device that people get because they’re absolutely desperate to be available all the time. Still, nifty stuff, and I look forward to seeing it roll out to more platforms.
• Albert Lai gave an update on BubbleShare, which was recently acquired by Kaboose. Key message: the amount of due diligence applied to vetting a purchase doesn’t scale linearly with the size of a transaction, and in fact there’s not much more work to clear something 10 times as big.
• Will Pate gave a demo of Flock, which I’d heard about but hadn’t actually tried. I don’t get to spend a lot of time on Macs these days, but it’d be interesting to try it out just to pick up a few new ideas.
• We also got some updates from previous DemoCamp presenters, some of whom are doing really well. In particular, Freshbooks went from 7,000 accounts to 130,000 in the past year. Mike apprarently gets email reports about this stuff every morning, which is something I really want to do at the office.

Other thoughts:

• I’m amazed and astounded that a sound system made of podcasting gear and PC speakers could actually work as well as it did. There was a bit of clipping and distortion, but I could understand everything that was going on.
• Traci Lords and heart attack jokes will never stop being funny.
• People need to bring business cards so I can follow up on the things we talked about, unless of course that was a variant on the thing where the girl gives you a fake phone number (not that that’s ever happened to me). Oh well, I’ll just have to catch them at the next event.
• Mobile Monday was on the same night. Apparently they had a bunch of VCs there talking about how to make money. We mostly talked about how much it sucks that you can’t get an affordable data plan in Canada (and no, I didn’t start those conversations, but they were frequent.)
• I don’t know where the idea bubbled up, but it seems that the pattern is that when you’re making something for yourself to use, just open it up to the world. That’s not a bad way to get started.

Technorati Tags: DemoCamp

On the same week as it’s revealed that Vista users have to worry about audio files trashing their machines, we get this quote from Bill Gates:

“Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.”

That’s almost as amazing as Microsoft’s response to the speech thing. I mean, “well, it only affects users with speakers and microphones”? Yeesh…

(quote via Simon Willison)