My Experience with the Dvorak Keyboard Layout
One customization that some computer power users make is to use a different keyboard layout. Back when I was a student at University I took the time to learn to use Dvorak layout.
I can’t remember why I stopped using it, but I had reverted to using QWERTY layout since then. Recently I started doing my main development work [...]
Re-reading High Fidelity
I recently re-read Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity”. I love this story.
It’s about a guy who’s a total music geek, and bit of a loser; and it’s a coming-of-age story as he ruminates over his romantic life. One of the reasons I find the story fascinating is it’s narrated with the narrator’s stream-of-conscious.
I love stream-of-conscious narratives. (Or [...]
Long Tail of Org-Mode Features are Compelling
One of the things I don’t like so much about proselytising of Emacs’ org-mode is mentioning the vast swarth of features org-mode has.
Partly I think it’s ‘intimidating’ to see a bit list of features and be told “you have to learn this, it’s great”. (See the org mode manual table of contents for an overview).
Partly because [...]
Doom Eternal
Hype I watched several interviews the Doom Eternal’s game director Hugo Martin on YouTube. That he played with a controller on Nightmare difficulty is impressive. That’s legit. (Pax East 2020, from 5:20 onwards). The Noclip podcast with him is also excellent.
I was surprised to see Hugo Martin say things like: - After Doom 2016, they added features to [...]
Developer Training and Knowledge
“What are the costs?” ought to be a natural question provided alongside “what are the benefits?”. This doesn’t get asked often enough in the discussions of new tools/technologies.
The costs/benefits implicitly impact discussions since the trade-offs will be different in different situations.
As a developer, I ought to have this in mind when consuming discussions. To get better [...]
Early Impression of Elm
Recently I wrote some Elm-lang code as part of a casual side-project. The Elm program was simple, though non-trivial.
The program was a UI for making notes from emails. The Elm program presented a list of emails for the user to select, and let the user CRUD a note for the selected email. Some changesets: - https://github.com/rgoulter/simple-email-data-tool/pull/1/files Initially adding [...]
On Agile
“Agile”, “Scrum” and “Kanban” all get a rather bad reputation among developers on the internet. They seem to work well for some teams, but for others these are “waterfall or spiral development in agile clothing”. At worst, teams take tasks off a todo list however they would anyway and call it ‘agile’. At best, maybe the differences can be explained [...]
On the 2019 UK Election Results
I found these two comments interesting: 1. Twitter Thread https://twitter.com/LukePagarani/status/1205487970897342464?s=20 What I get from this is: The perspective is a leftist voter discussing that people he met didn’t value the same things that Labour/Corbyn did. Such voters valued their national identity, and so really didn’t like Corbyn. 2. Quillette post https://quillette.com/2019/12/13/britains-labour-party-got-woke-and-now-its-broke/ I find it interesting that these two comments more/less [...]
First Impressions of Halo Reach
So the Halo Master Chief Collection made its debut on Steam with Halo Reach. This seems to be in line with Microsoft making money based on the brands they’ve built up before. e.g. They’ve re-released Age of Empires II in an “HD Edition”; and recently re-released Age of Empires II in a “Definitive Edition”. (That said, in addition to graphical [...]
Consumption Driven Organising
I’ve been meaning to try and write down some things about the way I organise things. I’m still improving, trying to keep the stuff that ‘works’ and ditch the stuff which I’m not consuming. Anki: I’ve been using Anki for learning Vietnamese vocabulary. Yeah, one tip is to use it on a smartphone; that really reduces friction for revising the [...]