DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

More fun for nerds… use Google to search the Jargon file (aka the New Hacker’s Dictionary).

ESR calls this tool jargoogle. It supplies a standard search form as well as a promising JavaScript widget (that, I regret, does not appear to work in Mozilla 0.9.6).

Some favorite entries: astroturfing, VAXectomy, Zawinski’s Law, Gates’ Law, Hanlon’s Razor

Well, this is interesting, at least to me.

There need no longer be any confusion as to whether a storage device claiming a capacity of, for example, 10 GB, actually holds 10 x 1000 MB or 10 x 1024 MB, and further whether a megabyte is 1000 Kb or 1024 Kb, etc. Although these measures have been applied somewhat randomly in the past, most egregiously by disk drive manufacturers, the “fix” has been available since December 1998. I just learned of it today, from Macintouch.

In short, the resolution was to create and standardize new unambiguous names for various things. Sample:

one kibibit 1 Kibit = 210 bit = 1024 bit
one kilobit 1 kbit = 103 bit = 1000 bit

Here is the full list of the “new” Prefixes for binary multiples, from the IEC. This is a part of the fantastically useful NIST Reference on Constants, Units and Uncertainty, which among other tidbits provides a complete listing of all the standard prefixes (or prefixen ? I’ll have to check the suffixes page!) from yotta (10²⁴) to yocto (10^-24).

Within your children’s lifetimes, someone will probably have to expand that list, as speeds and capacities grow. Now that is a cool thought.

Jon Carroll wrote a column last week about the war. It struck a chord… I agree with him.

This is the piece: Not to be entered into lightly

Here’s something to do while you’re waiting… you can watch Tony Levin and the California Guitar Trio perform three sets of finger-busting acoustic music courtesy of primeticket.net.

Tony Levin’s home site: www.tonylevin.com

If you don’t recognize his name, you’ll probably still recognize his work — just take a peek at his discography.

OMIGOD it’s been weeks, how have you been?!

I have been within an acceptable range of comfort, but severely preoccupied learning how to type. You might think I already know how to type, and you’d be correct — I learned to type in 1981 from a 7-foot-tall man whose other job was coaching the school’s basketball team. Spending a disproportionate amount of the intervening 20 years at a keyboard has improved my typing speed, to about 8 characters per second as near as I can tell… not a record-setting rate, but fast enough that I realize a significant productivity benefit as compared to a casual user, especially considering just how much I type in a typical day.

I rarely even type letters any more; entire words and phrases leap onto my screen, the result of short hand-spasms and interstitial twitching. UNIX commands, SQL and PHP keywords are particularly deeply ingrained, both because those vocabularies are tiny and because I use them so frequently.

But I decided to throw it all away and learn the Dvorak keyboard layout instead. Why I would do this is a question I would probably ask myself frequently if I wasn’t so distracted remembering where all the letters on my keyboard have moved to.

One reason is that I’ve had several brushes with RSI, and an occupational therapist suggested that making changes before I do permanent damage might be a good thing. Another reason is that the qwerty arrangement is inefficient; the goals it was designed to meet did not include the reduction of motion for the user. (Example: on the qwerty layout, all the letters in the word ‘typewriter’ appear in the top row, to save typewriter salesmen of the 1800s the tedium of hunting and pecking during product demonstrations. [source: Grolier’s, via Dylan McNamee’s Dvorak page])

Compounding the challenge is a simultaneous switch to a bizzare new keyboard, one of the Kinesis contoured models.

So, until I regain some speed, updates to this site may be infrequent. The story ideas are stacking up, but it still takes me too long to write them.