John August

Geek Alert

Fatter RSS feed now available

Geek Alert

If you’re subscribing to this site via RSS, there’s now an RSS 2.0 feed that includes the full text of articles, along with any comments posted images and some formatting.

I’m in the process of revamping a lot of things on the site. Pretty soon you should be able to subscribe to a variety of new feeds, including just the comments on a particular entry. And if you’re not using RSS yet, try Googling it to find a good newsreader for your computer. It’s the closest thing yet to an IV drip for information.

UPDATE: The [Feeds](http://johnaugust.com/site/feeds) section is now working.

Digital cinema gets a little closer

Geek Alert

A while back, Sylvain from Quebec wrote in to ask, “[Will digital ever replace film?](http://johnaugust.com/news/000039.html)” My response (“yes, eventually”) drew a fair amount of discussion and disagreement, particularly in terms of distribution, with some readers trumpeting film-based technologies such as Maxivision.

An [article on CNET today](http://news.com.com/Digitizing+the+multiplex/2100-1025_3-5330706.html?part=rss&tag=5330706&subj=news.1025.5) does a nice job explaining how the studios are working to pick a standard for digital video distribution, with the hopes of saving themselves $800 million a year:

>A technology consortium called the Digital Cinemas Initiatives (DCI), created by the major Hollywood studios in early 2002, is finally nearing completion on a set of technical recommendations that is intended to rally the industry around a single technological standard […] based on the JPEG 2000 video format.

I think it’s encouraging that they chose the relatively open JPEG 2000 standard, rather than Microsoft’s Windows Media 9.

Ingenious comment spam booster

Geek Alert

For readers unfamiliar with content management systems like [Movable Type](http://movabletype.org) (which this site uses), one annoying trend is [comment spam](http://www.elise.com/mt/archives/000246concerning_spam.php), where an automated system will place comments on various articles, linking back to a target site — often one that sells cigarettes, for whatever reason.

The original goal for comment spam was apparently to boost Google page rankings for ne’er-do-well sites by increasing their number of “incoming links.” Movable Type and Google are now smart enough to keep this from happening, but the spam comments persist. [MT-Blacklist](http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/), a plug-in, does a good job helping sort out the valid comments from the crap, but some of the older articles on the site which pre-date MT-Blacklist still have spam comments.

Which brings us to today. Every time someone adds a comment to the site, I get a copy of it in my email. This morning I got a strange one:

> Q: if two players are presented with a diamond flush(Ace, Queen, 10, 7, and 3) in the five community cards and player A has in the hole (ace of hearts and queen of clubs), and Player B has in the hole (jack of diamonds,and 9 of spade). who is the winner?,and please explain why player A or B is the winner.thankyou

I get a lot of off-topic questions, but this one seemed perversely far afield. (Even though I knew the answer: Player B, right?) Only when I pulled up the entry did I realize that the comment directly above it was a leftover spam ad for “seven card stud x play poker online x free texas holdem…” So the new “question” was really comment spam designed to boost exposure to the first comment spam.

It was meta-spam.

On one hand, I was sort of impressed. The spamming system either kept track of everywhere it placed its first spam and went back for a follow-up (months later, it seems), or searched the web for copies of the first spam and tacked on the second.

Here’s to you, Mr. Spammer, for a hard day’s coding. Now go to hell.

My new keyboard setup

Geek Alert

I’ve had my share of troubles related to typing all day. It’s hard to say if I ever had classic carpal tunnel syndrome, but a few years ago, my hands started going numb if I typed too much. Worse, I would wake up in the middle of the night with both my arms dead asleep.

Since then, I’ve gotten a lot smarter about general office ergonomics. I try to remember to take breaks, and keep aware of not slouching over the desk. But being a geek, my hard-wired inclination is to address the problem with gadgets.

[nuform](http://adesso.com)
**GEEK FACTOR: FOUR**

My first life-saver was an ergonomic keyboard. For the last few years, I’ve been using the [Adesso](http://www.adesso.com) NuForm keyboard. Like most ergonomic keyboards, it breaks the traditional keyboard in half, placing the right hand and left hand sides at a slight angle, saving wear-and-tear on the wrists. Most ergonomic keyboards are raised in the center, but the NuForm is basically flat, which I prefer.

After a couple of years on this keyboard, I find it hard to type on a regular straight keyboard. When I’m traveling for work, I usually bring it along. In London this spring for [Charlie and the Chocolate Factory](http://imdb.com/title/tt0367594/), I broke a few keys, but managed to keep it going. Good thing, too: I haven’t been able to find a source for the NuForm anymore.

[keyboard](http://www.safetype.com)

**GEEK FACTOR: NINE**

Screenwriter [Dana Fox](http://imdb.com/name/nm1401416/), who happens to be my former assistant, has had more troubles with repetitive stress injuries than I have. She was the one that turned me on to what is quite possibly the Holy Grail of insane keyboards, manufactured by SafeType.

Like most ergonomic keyboards, SafeType breaks the keyboard in half. But it then goes berserk, mounting them vertically, with the number pad and arrow keys placed in between. You obviously need to be a touch-typist, since you can’t see keys. And since no one really knows where the function keys are, there are two “rear-view” mirrors mounted on the back like wings. The function keys are labeled backwards, so in the reflection, you can find F7 or whatever.

As you might expect, the first hour or two using this keyboard is terrifying. I got a headache. After two days, though, you stop thinking about it. Your fingers inherently know where to go, and once you get used to feeling for the home row (the J and F keys have indentations), you rarely screw up. In fact, I’m probably typing just as fast on the new keyboard as I did on the old one.

Ergonomically, the big advantage to a vertical keyboard is that you’re not twisting your forearms around to type. By keeping your wrists neutral, there’s a lot less strain. SafeType recommends a [Quill Mouse](http://www.quillmouse.com/) to go with it, but I can’t imagine life without my mouse
wireless IntelliMouse Explorer, which makes web surfing oh-so-much more pleasant.

If it’s not obvious, I really like the new keyboard. However, I would offer a couple of caveats to anyone thinking of buying one:

1. It ain’t cheap. New, it costs $295. They also sell factory-refurbished models for $149.
2. It isn’t USB. You need to buy an adaptor cable for USB, or for Macs.
3. On a Mac, the extra buttons (volume, etc.) don’t work. But I really doubt I would use them if they did.
4. Command-Key combinations are more difficult. But that can be addressed…

One nice side benefit of my new keyboard is that it takes up less desk space. That lets me keep my mouse a little closer on the right-hand side. With the extra room on the left, I invested in the Nostromo Speedpad n52 controllern52, which I think may catapult me the extra few parsecs into Geek Factor 9.5.

The n52 is really designed for videogames, letting the player keep his right hand on the mouse while hitting all the keystrokes with his left. I don’t play Splinter Cell, but on a daily basis I do a lot of Cut, Copy, Paste, Save, Undo, Hide, Hide Others, etc. Using the Nostromo Array (!) software that comes with it, I have all these functions mapped to the fifteen keys on the n52.

This has made high-volume text editing extremely productive. Right hand selects; left hand clicks. Combined with a good clipboard utility, I can stack up a half-dozen chunks of text to paste at will. You can remap the keys for different applications. I still need to go through and set up macros for Final Draft formatting.