It Is A Mystery…

The more observant of you may have noticed some signifier of the FOAF linkage on my front page (returned after a hiatus). That’s right, you know who I am now!

That being said, everything up to now (and my quietness) has a fairly long backstory.

It started back in November of last year, when an attempt to renew pipian.com went horribly wrong (Thanks RegisterFly!) $130 and nearly two months later, I finally got it back and, by that time, had started on a new project.

This project is still somewhat secret as it’s incomplete at this time, but it’s progressing well (and some of you already know of it) and will hopefully will be marketable by the summer (crossing my fingers of course).

In the process of working on this and getting back into the groove at school (and in all the hecticness of setting up and being Chief of Operations at Genericon XX) I managed to finally (and briefly) meet Jim Hendler, who is currently in the process of moving to take a constellation chair at RPI this semester. This got me thinking.

One of the items that my ’secret’ project needs is something of a stable geospatial framework of coordinates, cities, and hierarchies, to enable intuitive and ’smart’ discovery of as many cities as possible, and as needed. Thus, I came up with the concept of the Semantic Web Locationary, utilizing several well-known semantic ontologies and several free/libre data sources to accurately describe many geopolitical constructs (mainly hierarchies of city->province->country->continent->Earth styles).

I figured this would both help to get my feet wet in a seriously usable semantic web context (The Geonames.org ontology is not terribly human-friendly, even if machine-friendly and more detailed than the Locationary) as well as offering a framework for my program to rest on as well as offer a static reference for other semantic applications (foaf:basedNear anyone?).

At any rate, it’s somewhat stable now, in so far as all the MAIN parts are implemented (if a bit in semantic flux at the moment), so I can move closer back to the project by overlaying one more data store over the existing Locationary (Arash Partow’s Global Airport Database, given the fact that DAML no longer has their airport script online, DAFIF is no longer available, and my project needs airport locations) and probably making that publically available as well…

More information about what I’m REALLY planning with this semantic data when the project gets closer to completion.

Finally, a week without much homework… After a month of almost working solid. Well-earned I think…

I might be able to get something useful done and earn some money for once too.

Also something cool I just learned: The venerable xscreensaver has a native Mac OS X port. Now I can have GLMatrix again! (Poor Windows doesn’t get it, and XGL doesn’t like displaying OpenGL in its windows)

Well, I’ve returned to school, which starts on… Tuesday? In any case, that means my schedule’s changing. My classes on Monday and Thursday start bright and early at 8:00AM, so I’ll be in bed at midnight EDT on Sunday and Wednesday. The rest of the time it won’t be later than 2.

In other news, if I allow cheating, typing speed on Dvorak is up to 32 WPM (28 AWPM). “pipian” is horrible to type. Almost as bad as “ls -lt.”

Supposing I stick with it…

1. 4-key (U, H, F, J) Dvorak keycap packs for various popular keyboard models. (e.g. Model M, Dell QuietKeys, Apple Pro Keyboards, Laptops) That way the home row is easier to find.
2. Inline USB ‘hardware Dvorak converters (also for laptops) That way there’s less to fiddle with on another computer.
3. Alternate keycaps (e.g. AltGr, Meta, Command) along with alternate bucky-bits for Unikey Model-M-like keyboards, so I can be ‘productive’ anywhere…

At the one-day-in mark, while I can get away with not looking at the keyboard, I’m still very much tempted to, and my practical speed is about 13-15 WPM. It’s going to be slow going for the next two weeks… By which point I should hopefully be at around 40WPM, I hope…

I’ve been touch-typing QWERTY for some time, ever since I started at age 13 or so.

Thus far, here’s my stats on an Apple Pro Keyboard:

(Accuracy in keys hit/total keys for each finger, from left pinky to right pinky, and then the thumb.)

89/89, 77/80, 27/28, 26/26, 74/75, 22/23, 50/51, 04/04, 92/93
Keystrokes Per Hour: 20277
Words Per Minute: 67
Adjusted Words Per Minute: 66

The reason I’m focusing on this is a curious one. I’ve been casually interested in Dvorak for a while now, and recently, my brother came into the possession of some 15-20 Apple keyboards of various design (Yeah, I know… That’s a lot!), of which at least 5 are Apple Pro Keyboards. I figured that now was as good enough a time to start learning Dvorak, which I plan on starting after this post (to finish preparing and such), so if you see me responding slowly for the next few days, you know why.