thoughts

Touchtyping analogy

Today I engaged in yet another discussion about the need of touchtyping for programmers with few of my collegues. My position on this issue is ver well known – I think that touchtyping is a requirement for a good programmer. I accept, of course, that there are few good programmers out there who can’t touchtype, but they are very few and they are only an exception that supports the rule.

While in said discussion, I was trying to come up with a good analogy from a non-IT area for a programmer who can’t touchtype. I know of two ways to come up with a good analogy.

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Diging into cultures

Lame title, I know, but I couldn’t think of a better one and now it’s too late.

One of the things I like about living in Cyprus is that I can meet with people of different cultures. Cypriots, Greeks, British, Russians, Eastern Europeans, Indians, Phillipinos, Pakistanis, Chinese, Lebanese – these are just a subset of people living in Cyprus. Additionally, there are a couple of millions of tourists travelling in and out of country every year.

Meeting these people and talking to them, even if briefly, greatly expands the horizons of cultural understanding. Even just watching them – how they behave on their own or in the group of their countrymen or mixed with others – triggers a lot of thinking.

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Tags in system applications

I was thinking about how cool tags are. They truly help finding bookmarked or themed information faster. Keeping up with important issues is much easier too.

But are there any good uses for tags in system applications? Sure, there are. One particular area that springs to mind is font management.

After I have installed about 6,000 fonts on my computer I realized that it is extremely difficult for me to efficiently use them. There are no categories or bookmarks of any kind. There are not subfolders. There are no comments or descriptions. I would be willing to sort out and tag all these fonts once to be able to find the most appropriate font later.

KDE people? Anyone?

Bloglines missing functionality

With all my praises of Bloglines you might be thinking that I am hiding some drawback of this service to make it look better. I can understand that, but that’s not true. I am indeed seeing Bloglines in the positive light most of the time. When I don’t I let you know with the same ease as I do with all my praises.

Today I realized that Bloglines is missing one important feature that I need. I didn’t need six month ago. I just started to need it now. And I will need it more and more in the future. I am talking about automatic unsubscibing from feeds. Or feed expiration, if you will. Let me explain.

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Racism. Working on myself. Progress.

For a long time I considered myself to be a non-racist. I wasn’t judging people of other races differently. I wasn’t talking to them differently. Actually, I wasn’t minding them at all. And I’m talking about all the races now – black, white, yellow, red, whatever. All of them were the same to me. Or so I thought.

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