Fastidious Elegance

Don’t take it personally. I'm just not concerned about your preferences, or mine for that matter. My goal is to design efficient workflows that everyone benefits from.

Scribes Developer — Emotional Software Engineering

The above is from an interesting blog post on the demands of software engineering. I am not sure that I agree with it, but I have to admit that I like what such a philosophy has produced in the form of the Scribes Text Editor. This is a fast, sleek, and powerful text editor for GNOME that actually seems to succeed fairly well at being distraction minimal. Is it really better to focus on efficiency rather than the emotional desires of an user?

The virtually unquestioned assumption at the time of the legislation's passage was that a more-or-less final decision on the legislation would await a U.S. Supreme Court hearing on the package has been virtually without comment.

— The Constitution Must Win in 2012, II.: The Myth of Judicial Supremacy

This is a good read on the Judiciary, but I also want to point out something else that I think people often overlook. Not only does the Constitution expressly limit the Judiciary, so also it limits the rest of the Federal Government. People seem to think that the government is whatever they want it to be. In some sense they are correct, but you have only two choices if you want to fundamentally alter the government; you do it legally by legally amending the United States Constitution, or you ignore the Constitution and implicitly support a government that defies the Law and the foundation that protects the liberty and prosperity of our country. Most people jump at the chance to support a criminal government, and I shudder to think of it.

The Constitution was never designed to govern a people; it was designed to govern a government, to restrict and limit the powers of that government so that the people were protected from it. One need look no further than the history of Hitler's rise to power to understand the need for such limits, but Americans today are embracing the creation of a demon in the raiments of an angel, feeding the demon on the smoke and ash of a burning, dying Constitution and in exchange this demon feeds them the life blood of their fellow man. Instead of revulsion and ire, Americans are lapping up the blood of their fellows as if it were always theirs, as if it were their birthright.

As America cheers the slaughter of their kin, so one day will their beloved demon expose the chains of their slavery and America will cry out in self-righteousness as this demon drags them to the altar of social justice and personal rights, an altar they built themselves with all eagerness, to be sacrificed in turn to their fellows, all the while wondering in surprise and shock at how this could have happened.

I pray that Americans today will stand up, listen, and remember the cycle of history, and of power, and of slavery, and the blood and the suffering endured to lift a people from this anguish; that they will not abandon the principles and hope that have given America cause to rejoice. I pray, but I have little enough faith in the endurance or character of our generation to expect change for the better; history, if anything, teaches us that man does not learn from his mistakes.

Making a difference, however, means more than cheering from the sidelines or writing a check; it means making smart decisions on how to make a difference—not waiting for the world’s governments to solve all the world’s problems.

— James Carafano, Cornering #Kony

I like the conclusion to this article a lot, but overall, I like the message of the rest of the post nearly as much. I will put my own thoughts on this as well: government is not the solution to the world's problems; good people making a difference outside of government, rather than expecting governments to fix their lives is.

I have previously written about my initial impressions of my recently acquired Truly Ergonomic keyboard. They were mostly positive, but at the time I was not able to say anything about the ergonomic claims of the keyboard without becoming used to the thing. Now that I have had a chance to use the keyboard daily in a few different environments I am pleased to report on my findings. Generally speaking, this is definitely one of the better keyboards in terms of ergonomic comfort and typing efficiency. The layout has few changes, but these changes manage to effect significant ergonomic gains.

Proceeding inward from the macro to the micro, let us first consider the form factor in general and the dimensions of the keyboard as a whole. In particular, many ergonomic keyboards including the Kinesis Advantage, Maltron, Microsoft Natural, and most in-store boards are large, if not larger than a normal board. This makes mousing rather difficult, and forces more use of the keyboard. Many claim that this is a good thing, but I am convinced that proper mousing in the right context is both more efficient and more gentle. If the mouse is too far away, the mouse cannot be used properly. The TEK is very narrow compared to other systems and thus makes mousing much easier.

Initially, I was not sure of the angle of the straight/column aligned keys, but now that I have used it more, I think the angle quite good. The column aligned keys took some more practice to master, but are excellent for minimizing large travel of the hands.

Overall, the layout of the alphanumeric keys is excellent, but what of the modifier keys? These are placed at the sides of the keyboard in a uniform manner. This uniformity makes it much easier to use these keys, kecause they are uniformly large. The placement of the shift keys seems strange at first, but its practice bears up quite nicely under longer term scrutiny, partially because moving the shift keys up on the keyboard not only makes the shift nicer and easier to use but also improves the accessibility of the other modifier keys, since they now have more room below.

There are a few keys which have less appeal. In particular, the tilde key is the hardest key to reach among those keys that might be reached while still maintaining some tactile connection to the home row. On the whole however, the positions of the keys is remarkably conservative while being impressively superior to the traditional layout, especially if one considers hand usage balance.

Finally, the key switches are as light and pleasant as promised. I think these switches are pretty standard, so I will say only that they deserve the respect they receive among mechanical key switch enthusiasts.

In summary, the TEK is a deceptively clever keyboard with good ergonomics and only a few minor inconveniences. It is among the most ergonomic of keyboards for either the price, form factor, or in general. I can heartily recommend this keyboard for anyone who wants a good keyboard that is affordable and yet still in the top leagues of ergonomics.

It is now possible to easily use the latest version of ChezWEB on the Silo machine or any other machine with Chez Scheme 8.4 installed on the Sharks or Burrow networks, since I have installed a public version of the latest version of ChezWEB. Here is a set of commands that will do it for you:

$ cd ~/bin
$ ln -s /nobackup/awhsu/ChezWEB/cheztangle
$ ln -s /nobackup/awhsu/ChezWEB/chezweave
$ mkdir -p ~/texmf/tex/generic
$ cd ~/texmf/tex/generic
$ ln -s /nobackup/awhsu/ChezWEB/chezwebmac.tex
$ texhash

I hope those of you who use ChezWEB like it! For those of you who don't, well, too bad, and I'm sorry.

Update: it would help if the commands were actually valid.