Month: June 2006

There is no much use in studing foreign languages if you hate to listen and have nothing to say.

Via Scripting News I came across this piece of an interview with Bill Gates, who says that he watched pirated content on the Internet.

These are such a big news, that… that… that… I am going to accept bets on where it will first be flamed – Slashdot or Digg. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets!

Update: My appologies. This story was already digged.

I’ve been using Bloglines ping service for some time now and I have to say that it works very well. What’s a ping service? Well, it’s one of those little new technologies that helps you bring audience to your blog posts faster.

Here are the instructions for the lucky users of WordPress (things couldn’t have been easier):

1. Open your administration interface
2. Click on ‘Options’ menu
3. Click on ‘Writing’ menu
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page
5. Add http://www.bloglines.com/ping URL to the ‘Update Services’ field.
6. Click on ‘Update Options’ button

You’re done. From now, every time you post new entry to your blog, your WordPress will notify Bloglines about it. Bloglines will fetch your RSS feed, parse it, and incorporate your new post into its archives. It will take from a few seconds to a minute or so.

Why is this important? Well, whoever is subscribed to your blog’s feed via Bloglines will immediately notice the update. They won’t have to wait until Bloglines decides that it’s about time to fetch your RSS.

As a result, the period of time between you posting and the world knowing about it will get much shorter. You’ll start getting comments to your entries minutes after you posted, not hours, or days.

I’ve just considered how conservative keyboard manufacturers are. Look at your keyboard right now. At every key. And think when was the last time you used it.

Letters, numbers, ESC, Enter, and spacebar are about the most used ones. Ctrl, Alt, Shift are too. Backspace and Delete get a share of their usage. That’s about it for frequent keys.

Home, End, Page Up and Page Down were much more useful before. Not anymore, I guess. Most people prefer either a shortcut or a mouse click or scroll. I don’t know anyone personally who have used Insert key at least five times in the last ten years.

Function keys (F1, F2, F3, …) used to be very useful in DOS times. I know a few people who use them these days, but those are very few.

Tab is very useful for programmers and system administrators. Not much so for the rest of the world.

Caps Lock and Scroll Lock are the two keys that I’ve never used. Caps Lock in fact does more harm than good.

Sys Rq, Break, and Pause – hardly anyone knows what these keys can be used for.

My point is that times change, software changes, needs change. But the keyboard hasn’t changed much in it’s lifetime. Mouse is a much simplier device, but it went through a whole bunch of evolution changes (trackballs, optical mice, scroll wheels, one-two-three-…-ten buttons, sizes, shapes, etc). Keyboard? No.

There are just a few modifications that I’ve seen – blank keyboard (no letters on buttons), LED keyboard (which is still in prototype), hacking keyboard (no caps lock, no number pad on the right). That’s about it.

Do you know of any other interesting keyboards (no multimedia keyboards, please)? Do you like this keyboard conservatism?

According to Read/Write Web, Digg website will be re-released as version 3 on coming Monday.

Apart from the better interface, I find it interesting that they are going beyond Technology section. Science, World & Business, Entertainment, Video, and Gaming sections will be added with many more topics inside those.

While I personally don’t use Digg all that much, I can see how these new changes can bring more people to Digg community.