Never trust your hands to a generic, sticky old Dell keyboard that you just find on your desk at work. In my case, it took about a month of using that keyboard to develop a case of tendinitis. To be fair this is the second time I’d experienced such a problem; the mouse was partially responsible, and Emacs chording was also contributing it’s share.

Since this was the second time I’d experienced pains in my hands from typing I’d already done my research and knew that I’d want to look at buying a “Kinesis”: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/ keyboard. The problem was primarily that Kinesis make two very different styles of keyboards – the freestyle which is most similar to a conventional keyboard – with a similar layout except that it is split into two independent halves and the more radical Advantage. The Advantage has two recessed key ‘wells’, and radically has thumb keypads forcing you to make use of your more powerful digits. It was this latter feature that made me order the advantage even though this is an expensive keyboard. Personally I’ve never seen any true ergonomic keyboards (other than Microsoft Natural boards and the like) in real life – they just aren’t sold in South Africa and it costs a lot to have them shipped over here. So I asked around on various forums and newsgroups before committing to the capital outlay. One of the things that I’d never considered when making the choice was the type of keyswitches in the keyboard. In the past I owned an IBM buckling spring keyboard, so I do appreciate the feel of a good keyboard, although quite frankly I found the gentle softness and quietness of cheap membrane PC keyboards to be a relief after the IBM! It turns out that the kinds of keyswitch most highly prized on the geekhack forums are the Cherry (Cherry “Brown” is liked the most by some) and Topre switches. So, reason number two to buy a Kinesis Advantage – it has Cherry Browns. If you’re interested in ordering the same from South Africa bear in mind that it’ll cost you about twice the direct exchange rate once you’ve factored in UPS shipping (obligatory) and customs duties. So anyone who lives in Cape Town and wants to try mine out before buying, I fully understand!

This week’s powerball currently has a rollover jackpot of 90 million Rands. A highly attractive target. But before going off to “tata your chance”, let’s look at the statistical probability that you’ll win the South African powerball game.

CUPOOTINO, California. Steven Jobless, CEO of Crapple Corp, announced his company’s long awaited tablet form-factor machine last Wednesday. Whilst sequestered in the backwoods of Tennessee last year, Mr Jobless spent a lot of time waiting for medical test results and considering the meaning of life. Whereupon he had what he described as a “number 1 experience”. It hit him – the perfect Captive Market. The new product, marketed as the iPoo is of the ideal form factor for use whilst positioned on the lavatory. Unlike the early tablet products produced by their competitors, the iPoo is not a fully fledged compooter, but follows the Jeff Raskin school of thought on what constitutes a suitable “Intuitive Interface” for the average user.

In a recent SAP CRM 2007 implementation, we had the requirement to hide a view (“partial”) in response to a change in a dropdown value.

This is easily done using javascript code on the client side, and what’s more such a solution to the problem is easy to implement and is not really restricted to SAP CRM 2007 or even SAP web development in general.

An oldie, but a goodie, and there is always someone out there who doesn’t know about this. Often, one encounters video files that do not have an index or have a broken index- this is almost certainly the case if your media player or PVR refuses to allow you to fast forward within the file. Easily fixed under Linux using the following mencoder incantation:

mencoder -idx input.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -o output.avi

As a bonus, this apparently also repairs broken interleaving.

Some more great mplayer/mencoder hints, including tricks such as appending multiple AVI files are here.

In May 2009 I moved my VPS (Virtual Private Server) from being hosted by Linode in Dallas to Panix in New York City. Price wise, the offerings are identical, $21 monthly consisted of a Xen virtual server with 360MB of RAM, 16GB storage and 200GB of transfer, plus one additional public IP address. However, not all virtual private servers are created equal, and as I discovered benchmark measurements showed performance differences between the two offerings. Please bear in mind that the benchmark results that follow are not up to a proper standard of testing (the one host was running a 32 bit operating system whilst the other was 64 bit), testing was done in May (things may have changed subsequently), and you may luck out and be assigned to an underutilized host and get better than expected performance. These benchmark tests are just an interesting read, and may not be as conclusive as I would like, but they allowed me to make up my mind to move over to Panix.

I’ve been quite taken by the Time Traveler’s Wife (The novel by Audrey Niffenegger). Which is why I’m writing this post – the film adaptation of the book has left me with a hollowness inside that the book did not have, even though I so enjoyed the film. So herewith my first blog film review. DISCLAIMER: PLOT AND FILM SPOILERS TO FOLLOW, please do stop reading if you ever intend to read the book or see the film. My recommendation is to read the book first.

I’ve been quite shocked and saddened by the online disappearance of why the lucky stiff last week. Heck, the blogging engine for this site is written to make use of his micro web framework – camping.

_why wrote (writes!! we await the second coming) some of the more interesting ruby code out there. And he also wasn’t afraid to write things that were quite out there – on the borderland between programming and art. One of his creations was called blimlimb (the code is still around, but I fear some of the blimlimb scripts and repository history is lost). Imagine this, you’re sitting in a peaceful IRC channel and all of a sudden a whole troupe of bot actors appear in channel. They start performing a play for you, complete with actions and appropriate dramatic pauses. And the weird part is that the bot puppetmaster can also add a bit of improvisational scripting to spook those in channel further.

A short while back I downloaded and installed the SAP NetWeaver 2004S TestDrive SAP system (running on my Atom! machine at home). This provided me with my own (90-day licensed) basic SAP R/3 system which, according to the documentation, includes both ABAP and Java stacks running on SAP’s own database Max DB.

One of the issues that this system is prone to is that the Max DB log gets full (there is no default log cycling). It is quite a well known issue and is even described on the SAP on Linux: Test Drives – Tips and Tricks FAQ . In my case, I encountered this issue after running an SGEN job to generate all the basis components on the system. I could log into the SAP system, but the GUI froze before anything useful came up. Trying to run stopsap, it hung forever at the checking database step (where it runs R3trans d).

Looking in knldiag, I knew I had a full log problem because of this message:

2009-07-17 10:38:54    21 WNG 20001 KernelDB  99 percent of log area occupied, 126717 pages used

The newest version of my IRC bot, irbie is able to evaluate python code in channel and respond with the output.

It does this in only 33 lines of RUBY code.

(Sign seen at the Bellville cemetery) No camping, no cars, no HIV…

This is the most directly targeted HIV/AIDS campaign that I have seen thus far, but I’m afraid it may be a little too late.

Seek and ye shall find…

My car stereo (a JVC that accepts USB thumb drives) is really slow at seeking to a specific position in long audio files [To be fair regarding long seek times, the JVC does seek faster off a CDR disk. However, it’s not much faster and then you’re left with a pile of disks that have been played only once.]. So, if you loose your place in a long podcast (e.g. the kids want to listen to something) you can spend up to 15 minutes holding down the fast forward button just to find your place again. It also jumbles up the play sequence for all the audio files within a folder. Both problems can be easily solved on the computer or when you put the audio files onto the USB drive.

No, not halitosis !

There are many wonderful public git repositories out there – like github, of course, and gitorious (pity they didn’t seem to be able to find a sexual pun in that name!). But they don’t offer you a free private repository where you can store the code that you’re not particularly proud of or don’t wish to release into the public domain, etc. However, if you have a public facing internet host, or just about any ssh accessible box you can easily setup gitosis to create a private repository that is world accessible.

Welcome to my new blog – it’ll have all the sort of interesting ‘tech’ GNU/Linux/OSS/Who-abbreviated-this posts that I’d be most interested in reading about, the odd technical snippet that I’ve found to be indispensable, and maybe an article or two about plants will creep in here as well. I also give you my word that I will try to only post items of quality here. Although as they say a man’s word is never done….