About Me
I'm Laurence Gonsalves, and this is my blog. I'm an independent software developer, a maker, and also a dad.
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Thursday, August 05, 2004
Shuffle Steering
Arthur told me about this site which discusses the shuffle steering technique. It kind of reminds me of the shirt folding video. It's simple technique, but has significant advantages over the "standard" practice.
There was an article in Invention & Technology a few months ago about typewriters which mentioned the development of touch typing. It's funny to think that in the early days of typewriters, everyone would "hunt and peck". One of the first touch-typists astounded people by being able to type while blind-folded. Today, probably most typists touch type. Ironically, I'm not one of them. I learned to touch type in high school, but I've been doing a weird sort of three fingered typing since I was ten years old, and I've never been able to shake it. :-/
I don't find typing speed to be a huge issue for me, at least not when coding. When coding, most of my time is spent thinking, not typing. The one thing that makes me want to learn to touch type is that my current typing technique requires that I look away from the screen (and at the keyboard) periodically.
About Dvorak: back in highschool I was going to try switching to the Dvorak layout. I actually started moving my keycaps around, but it turned out that the keys on my computer's keyboard (an Amiga 2000, at the time) had different key heights for each row. I didn't realize this until I had about half of the keys in place, at which point I gave up and switched back to QWERTY. One of my friends switched to Dvorak, but I believe that he actually used a modified layout because Dvorak is well suited to English prose, not C or Java code (where semicolons and curly braces are very common, for example).
