Tag: tech

I finally was able to contact our ISP about our personal Internet connection. It turns out that the local telco is locally upgrading its capabilities so that the “other” pair of wires that comes into the house will be usable.

In case you’ve never bothered to look, there are two pairs of wires in Plain Old Telephone Service. Phones only use one pair, and DSL has used the same pair by making use of such high frequencies that they don’t interfere with telephones. At least, they mostly don’t interfere.

Our ISP is now going to use the other pair of wires, so the DSL signal will be carried separately from the telephone signal. I’m a bit intrigued to see how well it works. The ISP is making appointments for on-site installs, probably to make sure that all the wires involved really have four conductors. A lot of telephone wiring has only two conductors, since that’s all that anyone’s needed for phone service. Most of our phone patch cables have only one pair.

The Plucked Chicken is not professionally hosted, and relies upon our home DSL connection. It’s never been really fast DSL, but it’s been reasonably reliable. Most of the time. It seems now that our ISP is making some changes to their DSL setup in this area. I need to call them back to find out exactly what and schedule a time for them to stop by and update things. I’m guessing it’s a new DSL modem.

Anyway, since we received that message, our current DSL modem has been losing its DSL link intermittently. It actually requires a modem reboot for it to reacquire the link. So, if you can’t get to the Chicken at some point, don’t worry too much. I hope that things will return to normal next week.

It’s just possible that these changes will hamper my ability to host the Chicken. Many ISPs seem to push asynchronous bandwith with blocked ports, turning their customers from fully-fledged (no pun intended) Internet citizens into mere end-users or consumers of content, with no possibility of participating in the production of content (hosting web sites, etc.). I really hope that our ISP (Gorge Net) won’t try to herd us farther in that direction. We already have asynchronous bandwidth, and that’s not helping anything. If you find that the Chicken is down for an extended time, this too-common, misguided ISP philosophy may be the problem.

I’ve been suprised at the interest in the Dvorak article. So, just for the fun of it, I installed gtypist to run through a few exercises and see what my current typing speed is. I was expecting to see slower speeds than I was typing before the switch to the Dvorak layout.

It turns out that I’m typing faster than before. On the sentence exercises, my word-per-minute speeds were about evenly split between the high 90’s and the 100’s. That’s about 10 words per minute faster than I used to type with QWERTY, though I do recall occasionally flirting with the 100-wpm mark on a good day. In the word variation exercises using the Dvorak keyboard this morning, I registered in high 70’s, approaching 80 wpm. Of course, I’m also listening to Sunday’s Issues Etc. at the same time, and it’s a bit distracting from the concentration needed to do those exercises right.

But again, I don’t count typing speed as a major benefit of switching to the Dvorak layout. For me, it’s the ergonomics.

I use the Dvorak keyboard layout. It’s an alternative arrangement of the keys on the keyboard for better ergonomics. Most, if not all, computers can accomodate this layout through software drivers. There is quite a following of advocacy for the Dvorak layout, as well as detractors and debunkers.

I don’t claim that the QWERTY layout is bad. It was designed in the 1800’s, and was only one of several layouts used in mechanical typewriters, optimized for the smooth operation of those machines. Later, it won the popularity contest and became the only game in town. I used to type up to 100 wpm in QWERTY, usually in the 80’s when I bothered to check. It got me a job while at seminary, and helped with many other things. I learned to touch type QWERTY by forcing myself to do it right, beginning on an old 286 machine. Most of my practice was typing the papers of fellow students for money. (They had already been written. But once I got to choose the title myself. “Henry VIII: Can’t Get No Satisfaction, or Satisfaction Guaranteed?” Seriously.)

I made the switch to Dvorak well after I made the switch to Linux. I haven’t regretted either one, though there is a price for each. The price for Linux is not in dollars, but in willingness to learn. Learning fits my personality, so Linux and I have been inseparable. Dvorak also requires a willingness to learn. In this case, it’s willingness to re-learn, essentially retraining one’s reflexes so that when I think “toad” the proper fingers jump into action. Why did I switch? Not to type faster. Who really wants to type faster than 80 wpm, unless you’re taking dictation in the form of a speech or transcribing something? No, I did it for the ergonomics. I found that my carpal tunnels and my finger joints were aching, and not typing was not an option. So I figured out how to configure my OS (and later Windoze and MacOS), and away I went. Initially, the learning was somewhat hampered by the fact that my cheap keyboard still showed the QWERTY graphics. The easiest reference I had was an on-screen diagram. If you try learning Dvorak, I’d recommend buying an IBM model M keyboard and rearranging your keycaps. It’s the best keyboard ever made, anyway. The one I’m typing on now was made in 1984, and still works like new. That’s right: 1984.

It probably took me about 2-3 months before I was fully comfortable with my Dvorak performance. The adjustment was completely self-paced, with very few exercises. I found a typing tutor program that included Dvorak, and used it for maybe 30-45 minutes per week, tops. It was exciting to see my speed and accuracy increase. Soon I couldn’t sit down and touch type on a QWERTY keyboard any more. Exciting, but that brings me to my main point: the cost of switching. (I’d gladly pay it again.)

So now I can’t touch type on QWERTY keyboards, so when I use a strange computer, I’m either back to hunt and peck, or I reconfigure the keyboard temporarily. The latter is usually possible, and works well. Then, I have to remember to reset the keyboard when I’m done. Otherwise, someone else becomes frustrated. When I bought a keyboard for my Sony Clie, it only came with QWERTY drivers. So I had to open the driver program in my hex editor and rearrange the key codes until it was right. That actually worked rather well! But it illustrates the problem: I now type Dvorak in a QWERTY world. It must be like being left-handed. There are no Dvorak keyboards for sale. It’s just not an economic possibility. This isn’t because Dvorak is inferior, but because QWERTY simply dominates everything. (The fastest typer in the world uses Dvorak!) It takes real training to touch type, and training is expensive. Consider that the Air Force values its pilots higher than their million-dollar airplanes. It’s not just because the Air Force is old-fashioned, and believes in the intrinsic value of human life. No, Mabel, it’s the training. No wonder companies won’t buy Dvorak keyboards.

The cost of living in a QWERTY world is mostly a nuisance. The real problem arises when I have to use my computer’s CMOS or another hardware program that lives below my operating system. At that point, I need a QWERTY reference keyboard, because my fingers just don’t remember where those letters used to be! That’s also why it would be wonderful to find an affordable, high-quality Dvorak keyboard supported in the hardware itself instead of the OS driver. I understand that Apple actually made something like that once. Would that it could happen again!

Why am I willing to pay this cost? Because for me the ergonomics actually are better. I had been having some carpal tunnel and joint pain, but with the Dvorak layout, the stresses are all different. In fact, they’re better overall than with QWERTY.

Should you make the switch? Only if you’re willing to pay the cost. It’s not terrible, but it does take some perseverance. Is that still in the American vocabulary? Maybe. I won’t say that you’ll type any faster than before, though you might. However, I will say that you will find typing easier than before.

Yesterday morning our Internet connection became flaky, then stopped. I spent some time over lunch getting it working again. It was a bit frustrating, and the closest I can figure is that it had something to do with the old hardware I use for everything. This web server is running on an AMD K6, 333Mhz machine. Yeah. But it does OK, almost all the time. With all that this machine does, which is much more than serving a blog site, I hardly ever have to reboot it. Linux tends to be that way. When problems arise, they more often than not are caused by flaky hardware. I’ve been blessed to have few such problems with this machine.

How liberating it is to be using Linux. Sure, there are still problems and challenges; there always are problems, even with Apple products. But at least with Linux (as opposed, especially, to Windows), I didn’t pay good money to buy my problems. And beside that, there are fewer problems and more possibilities.

Enough about that. It seemed that my DSL peer wasn’t responding to my pppoe configuration requests. I think rather that my NIC was somehow munging the requests or not hearing the responses. In this case, I did a reboot to reinitialize the NIC (I maybe could have just reloaded its kernel driver module, but that can be tricky when performing these things via SSH to a headless machine), and all was well.

Except… I had tried eliminating the MTU setting on my ppp and pppoe daemons, to see if it would allow me to get pppoe config responses from the peer. I hadn’t restored the original setting. So when the network came back online, there was some really odd behavior. Until I finally remembered the MTU change, it was quite frustrating. MTU stands, I think, for Maximum Transmission Unit, which is a kind of throttle on the size of data packets that come in through the DSL link. It’s useful and even necessary when those data packets have to carry some extra information just to make part of the system work properly.

My home network is masqueraded through this machine. (It’s a bit more complicated, but the rest is not pertinent.) That means this machine handles all Internet traffic for the computers at home. The weird thing was that most web sites wouldn’t fully load. The browser would make the initial connection, and then sit there waiting for more data. However, Google’s web sites worked! How’s that for strange? Apparently, Google’s web servers are all configured to use a smaller MTU than most of the Internet. Other kinds of traffic worked, too, such as SSH to various servers on the web. Masquerading was working (though I often wondered how well). But apparently those problem web sites were sending data packets too large for our masquerading setup to handle, so the return packets weren’t making it through.

I was up too late trying to get things working, and finally shut everything down. I’m sorry if having the Chicken offline caused any problems. But maybe my little experience here will help someone, or maybe I’ll remember it for next time!