Alexandre Vassalotti

Once in a while, I practice to improve my touch typing skills. Most of the time, I just find some online stuff or use KTouch. But today, I wanted to try something different. I always hear good things about the Dvorak keyboard layout — i.e., how it’s supposedly more efficient and more comfortable than the Qwerty layout. Being a curious person, I wanted to test this out.

So when I opened up KTouch, I selected the Dvorak lecture, instead of the typical Qwerty one. The first lessons were fairly easy. As I went through the lecture, I managed to keep a fairly high pace and accuracy – i.e., about 210 characters per minute with a 95% accuracy. About at the fifth or sixth lesson, I said to myself: “Wow, I must have been a Dvorak typist in another life.” I was really impressed how quickly I had learnt the basics of the layout and I was indeed starting to believe that the Dvorak layout was vastly superior to Qwerty.

Shortly after, I was sold. At this point, I was thinking how was going to remap my Emacs key bindings.

However, when I got to the tenth lesson, I found something strange, very strange. The letter ‘q’ on the Dvorak layout was in the upper row on the left — exactly where it is on the Qwerty layout.

I stopped typing for a second…

…and look at the keyboard displayed on the screen.

“asdf asdf asdf”

Oops! I had forgot the change the actual layout of my keyboard. So, I was still using Qwerty.

Now, I realize that I have been victim of what they call the “placebo effect”. This little anecdote has certainly thought me to be more careful, in the future, when trying something new sold has “better”.

Bird are singing; the Sun is rising; and rivers are flowing again. In short, another beautiful summer is coming. To me that means the end of classes, and a wave of exams which will crush me for a week. But after, I will be free to do what I love — i.e. coding on open-source software, writing, and enjoying the weather while playing sports with my friends. Anyway, enough dreaming for today, I got some news.

I just finished the facelift to my blog’s layout. The new layout still keeps its original simplicity, while being more colorful and appealing. Personally, I am quite satisfied with the result. And thanks to two Firefox add-ons, called Firebug and Web Developer, the whole process was a breeze (and fun too). While I am at it, I would like to also thanks Becca Wei for the initial theme, Almost Spring, on which I built my theme upon. Feel free to comment about what you like or dislike. Since it’s you after all, who will use it (unless, of course, you’re using a feed reader).

A few longer posts will be coming up after I passed through my exams sessions. Plus, there will a weekly post about the status of my Google Summer of Code project. Thanks for reading!

Dear Applicant, Congratulations! This email is being sent to inform you that your application was accepted to take part in the Summer of Code.

Today, I am truly happy. I wasn’t expecting to be accepted, really, and perhaps no other candidate did. My accepted project is to merge C and Python implementations of the same interface (i.e., StringIO/cStringIO, Pickle/cPickle, etc), and my mentor is the Python star developer, Brett Cannon. This will be a challenging project; I will have to work hard and efficiently to be successful. But one thing is sure, I will have some great fun.

I would like to congrats everyone who have been accepted. A special thanks to students who will be working on Ubuntu, this summer. There is surely some great projects for Ubuntu. And also, another special thanks to the mentors, who will be helping us this summer.

A burned video, a zapped hard drive and a corrupt RAM module later , I have now, finally, got my system running again (and no, my computer was not struck by a lightning).

For the fans of my Emacs package, I just uploaded a new release, and I will continue to provide weekly releases. Unfortunately, it seems, due to a licensing issue, Romain Francoise orphaned emacs-snapshot and its related packages. Therefore, this means I will have to work harder and fix packaging bugs myself, instead of relying on his bug fixes.

A week before I lost my system, I had promised a special Python quiz, in the issue #31 of Ubuntu Weekly News. I have not forgotten my promise. So if you’re one of the lovers my twisted Ubuntu quizzes, get ready for an awesome quiz. Date and time, when the quiz will be held, will be announced, as usual, in the #ubuntu-trivia channel on FreeNode.

On the final note, I would like to mention that will start posting more frequently on my blog. My current roadmap includes some cool tips-and-tricks, fun script recipes, more stuff about Ubuntu. So, stay tuned!