Monday 31 January 2011

Overall progress

It seems like the tilting foils device is nearing completion! A few details left, some repairs and modification on the implantation chamber and then hopefully it will be tested in the experimental hall. Found a break in the analysis, trying to work out some statistics mismatches in two programs.

I have been slacking off with TDD lately, I tend to write a lot of implementation before tests, mostly because it's really hard to write tests for something like a "splitter widget". A lot of fail safes fall into invariance testing anyway. Maybe all I have to do is to write destruction tests for all those widgets. Also, memcpy() in an assignment operator or a copy constructor, bad idea, learnt the hard way. There's a reason why classes with pointers should define their own mentioned pair... Smart pointers are really nice, esp. unique_ptr for widgets. Had to write a custom container for grabbing and focusing which may be a little dangerous, better keep that in mind.

My brother has bought a Realforce, I am really excited about his thoughts on it. Hopefully he will have it today. I have gotten a slightly scary desire lately, to open up my Filco and reduce the activation force. Very intrusive manoeuvre, but the keys are not as light as they could be. I shall wait until I have tried a Realforce, to see whether I want to keep the Realforce or if I can go postal on my Filco.

"Cliffs of Dover" is way too overrated, Eric Johnson has so much more to give. "Trademark" is all I have to say.

I have started training Colemak seriously, I exercise every day. My muscle memory has pretty high momentum, however, so it's going pretty slow. It feels great, QWERTY is probably as inefficient as layouts can go (probably not really... EDIT(2011-10-25): carpalx has found the most ineffective layout by stochastic methods, if you're interested.More on carpalx in the next blog entry!).

Another recent idea I've had is to improve my "dreaming", or dream recall to be more precise. Paying more attention to your dreams apparently improves your chances (or even control) of lucid dreaming, something that has intrigued me for several years.