Levels of Detail

This post was written with Windows Live Writer 1.0 beta. It is a little client-side UI that works with wordpress, and lets you do a semi-WYSIWIG composition of a new post.

So I just found out about the new Consolas font from Microsoft that is being distributed with Office 12 and Vista. It’s a nice looking monospaced font that I think compares favorably with things like Bitstream Vera Mono on Linux, or Monaco on Apple.

Even better, you can easily use it on Windows XP. If you can manage to get your hands on the font file (either from the Office Beta or the Vista RC) you can just install it onto your XP system.

Finally, to get Powershell to use it, there’s a little bit more work involved. Thankfully Powershell to the rescue. “Here’s a script”:http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2006/10/16/Windows-PowerShell-Font-Customization.aspx that will set the registry up for you so that you can choose Consolas from the Powershell properties’ Font tab.

I’d still like to get profont working properly for powershell/cmd.exe though.

I gave in. There’s no point obsessing about this forever. This evening after work, I drove down to the “User’s Side San Jose branch”:http://www.users-side.com and put in an order for the black “Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2″:http://www.pfu.fujitsu.com/hhkeyboard/hhkbpro2/.

It was a bit more expensive: about $290 after tax, (that’s compared to about $220 or so at one of my favorite electronics stores in Japan) but if you think about shipping costing an extra $30 and having it in a few weeks vs having it 3 months later, I think it’s a reasonable price.

Besides, after using it for a few months, I’ll know whether I’ll want to buy a second one when I’m in Japan in the spring.

The guy at the store said barring any hiccups, it should get here next week or the week after that. When I asked over email, I was told 3-4 weeks, so I’m a bit skeptical, but here’s to hoping.

As cartman said.. “c’mon…. c’mon….”

“A page from eczemaguide.com”:http://www.eczemaguide.com/eczema_treatments/topical/topical_corticosteroids.html claims that “early evening” is the best time to apply topical steroids, though provides no scientific reason why that’s the case.

There are a lot of pages that have a breakdown of corticosteroids by potency, but the group them into vague groups such as “mild” and “potent,” whereas most doctors carry around the chart that has the the actual 7-class potency breakdown. I was able to find “this pdf”:http://www.skinandaging.com/docs/DrugGuide1006.pdf that breaks down the common ones along the same 7 classes, as well as in another dimension related to their chemical structure.

There seems to be a lot of controversy surrounding the safety of topical tacrolimus (Protopic) and pimecrolimus (Elidel) for the treatment of AD, in terms of whether there is a risk that they cause cancer. It all climaxed with the FDA sending out “black box warnings” on these products.

“Here’s an article”:http://www.skinandaging.com/article/5886 that surveys several dermatologists to see whether their prescribing strategies have changed since the warnings were added.

There were a few several interesting points for me:

* Seems most dermatologists don’t think the warning is warranted. Particularly, it was interesting that one said that it was more the primary care physician that would take patients off the prescription instead of the dermatologist. But who knows how the dermatologists in this article were selected.

* The animal studies which lead to cancer claims were for the oral form of the drugs, not the topical form. Of course it’s going to get a lot more in your bloodstream if you eat it instead of rubbing it against your skin. It’s still unclear how much of it has to get into your bloodstream before it starts becoming dangerous.

* TCI’s have lots of studies about them (both orally and topically administered forms). Some of the topical corticosteroids don’t have as many studies. How do we know that they’re any better?

I tend to spend a lot of time on the internet reading about health. About various types of diseases, their treatments, and available medications.

I don’t think I’m particularly obsessed about it, rather, a lot of it is directly relevant to me. I’ve had to deal with a variety of allergic/atopic diseases (hay fever, atopic dermatitis) for pretty much my whole life, so that’s what I spend my time reading about.

Anyways, the point of this new section is to hopefully serve as a resource for people who find this type of information useful. Note: I’m not a doctor, so all I really plan to do is post links to info that I think is useful.

A recent realization has got me wondering about ergonomics of keyboards. When I moved offices at work, my new office had a slightly higher desk, and no keyboard tray. Now, with such a desk, I sat at a lower height compared to that of the keyboard, and when I extended my hands to my keyboard, my elbow angles were more open — not the standard 90 degree angle you see in all those ergonomics guides. I’m slightly leaned back, and my arms are slightly extended, elbows out. And surprisingly, I can type for a very long time like this. (I’m sitting at my keyboard for hours when I’m at work)

Also, if I look at my wrists in such a configuration, they’re mostly straight, even though I’m typing on a standard non-ergo keyboard.

What does that mean? it seems to mean that the actual “ergo”-ness of the keyboard might not be the only significant component of comfort while typing. Or maybe it just means that even though I sit here all day, I don’t actually type that much.

At some point in my childhood, they seemed to have taught me about the home row of keys. How all my fingers should be resting on the home row, and how my fingers should be roughly perpendicular to the keyboard. Well, maybe my shoulders weren’t as wide then, but if I try to do that now, it just feels like I’m trying to squeeze into a small space — wrists are bent, and shoulders are tense.

In actuality, I don’t hold my hands so that they are perpendicular to the space bar. Rather, they’re at an angle that keeps my wrists straight. I often I find my fingers resting on the keys AWEFJIO; instead of the standard home row: ASDFJKL;. It doesn’t seem to really slow down my typing ot have my hands ths way. It’s not like the keyboard has changed at all, you just think a little differently about how you move your fingers.

So then what of these ergo, split layouts? I’ve tried quite a few: the belkin ps/2 and usb versions, the MS Natural Elite and 4000, the kinesis maxim and kinesis ergo. They’re all somewhat comfortable, but they’re all not complete win’s either. I always have the same complaints:

* They’re big
* Their layout is usually non-standard in some way
* The arrow keys/numpad are an afterthought.
* They make one handed typing difficult.

And now:

* It’s not even clear that you can’t get a similar level of comfort with a normal style keyboard.

And why is it that there are always new keyboards announced with the standard layout? All the gaming keyboards are that way. The Happy Hacking Keyboard still has a standard layout. All the Keytronics are all standard layout. Even the high end stuff, like the diNovo, are mostly standard layout. The CVT Avant Prime is standard as well, though that is built based on an older model. All the ‘Majestouch’ keyboards in Japan are standard, though I wonder how much of that is incfluenced by the need to conserve physical space there.

Also, there’s no such thing as an ergo laptop keyboard. And there are lots of people who type quite a bit on a laptop and usually don’t have problems. I didn’t really have a problem typing all day on my Powerbook. And I’ve been borrowing Thinkpads at work recently and they don’t seem to give me any problems either.

Likewise, switch officionados know that when it comes down to it, there are very few ergo keyboards with good switches. It comes down to pretty much the Kinesis ergo (very expensive, very non-standard layout), the old Northgate keyboards (impossible to find), the Comfort Type (expensive, kinda ghetto looking), and the Cherry Ergo-plus 5000 (which is also impossible to find).

Maybe it’s time to stop worrying about the _ergo_-ness of keyboards themselves and instead think about all the other parameters that go into my keyboarding comfort. Then maybe I won’t be limited to the small selection of split layout keyboards out there, and I can finally combine the benefits of good mechanical design with a comfortable experience.

I really like java as a language, but the behavior of the compiler can be a pain in the ass to deal with.

The problem with javac, is that it does some stuff that is akin to what make does. It figures out dependencies and compiles them for you. It tries to understand your source structure and resolves external classes at compile time. which in many ways is really handy, as it can typecheck against other classes without the need for header files.

But here’s where it get’s really annoying. If you try to work javac into a build system written in something like make or scons, it can get downright impossible. The problem is that given a .java file, it’s not easy to figure out which .class files get generated. Even if you could parse the file and find all the inner and anonymous classes, you still wouldn’t know which other files javac will go and build for you when you specify it to only build. For example, say you had the files:

a.java
b.java
c.java

and @a.java@ looked like:

import b;
import c;

If you were to tell javac to compile @a.java@, it would go and build @b.java@ and @c.java@ for you. So not only do you have to parse the local code of a.java, you have to understand how javac finds other classes, and also how this behavior is controlled by the comand line options.

For small projects @javac *.java@ may work just fine, but when it comes to huge automated build scripts, it can be a tricky thing to deal with.

Rhapsody 4 has this annoying bug: If you’re running on a dual head setup, and you maximize Rhapsody on the non-primary head, then minimize it, then restore it, it restores to the primary head, not the one it was previously on. Minimizing and restoring a window should never change it’s position on screen.

Anyhow, so I want to be a helpful user and report the bug to them. Seems very easy to reproduce and probably fairly easy to fix (I wrote some code for VMware ACE that did something somewhat similar. It’s like 3 Windows API functions). After poking around on Rhapsody’s poorly designed website, all I could find was a “contact customer suppport” link which took me to a page with a form to input a message to send to their system.

Ok, whatever, I fill it out with the simple question: “Where do I send bug reports?”

A day later, I get an automated response. I’ve been promoted to level 2 support due to the severity of my case.

Second day, I get a response from a human, pointing me at “this page”:http://real.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/real.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=6184&p_created=1159553728. Apparently all problems people have with Rhapsody are reported to the music-programming@real address. Doesn’t sound too encouraging. It also says you can also mention it in their forums.

Anyhow, the point is, I’m trying to help them make a better product here, but do they have to make it this hard to tell them about a simple bug? If there’s anything to be learned from Open Source projects is that transparency in terms of dealing with problems in your software will usually make people less annoyed about those problems.

It’s finally out, and looks pretty good to me so far. It’s pretty fast, and it has tabs, and it has tab thumbnails. It also seems to be a little bit more standards compliant.

The way they got rid of the menu is interesting. It seems hard to find things, but maybe I just have to get used to it.

They finally made Alt+D always select the address bar, instead of do nothing if you already have it focused. Ctrl+L strill brings up the dialog though.

The tab thumbnails screen is mapped to Ctrl+Q…

The RSS reader screen looks almost exactly like Safari. Whatever works, I guess. The whole thing feels way faster than Safari though.

It seems to eat up a lot of memory.. It’s at 94M in task manager after using it for about 15 minutes with 5 tabs open. I opened 5 roughly equivalent sites in Firefox, and it was at 37M. But the real test is how it behaves over time. Firefox seems really bad at letting go of memory after a while. Hopefully IE gets it right.

Anyhow, it might be good enough to stop using firefox for the moment.

Update: Memory consumption seems to be pretty steady so far. I’ve found one annoying bizarre behavior. If you close one tab among many, the next tab that gets focused is the one to the right, not the left, as it is in firefox. This makes the “open new tab next to current” option way less useful, since I like to open a new tab and then quickly close it and get back to where I was. Also, I don’t like how you can’t close a tab without selecting it first.

Update 2: Sadly http://www.vmware.com seems to get rendered improperly by IE7. I guess someone should have tested it with the beta or the RC. What? Don’t want to install beta software on your PC to test a website? well well, let me tell you about this magical prodcut called Workstation…