Scott's Blog

Finally decided to buy scottkirkwood.com for my vanity URL, why not? It points to my blog.instead of the less memorable scottkirkwood.blogspot.com  and paying for 5 years is relatively cheap.

In the spirit of "Release Early/Release Often" I've shipped the first version of key-train ( key-train-0.1.0.zip ). Here's a screenshot: Features include: Training for all the lowercase keys on the main part of the keyboard in two languages (English/Brazilian Portuguese) and two keyboards (qwerty/ABTN).  More languages and keyboards should be easy to add. Easy for others to contribute  better lessons  and  new keyboards . Easy for others to translate the software using the standard  gettext  package (I recommend using  poedit ). The  key-train.pot  file is created automatically - so don't edit it.  For your language, you would create a .po file like,  this one . A reasonable progression of keys and training (27 lessons). Speed and accuracy training by typing in parts of Wikipedia articles. Only one lesson file is required for different languages and keyboards. But the program isn't complete, here's a list of the biggest p...

After a few power failures during a week of storms I rebooted my Ubuntu Linux computer and fsck found some errors. Next time I booted it found (and corrected) even more errors, until, eventually I wasn't able to boot anymore (couldn't find grub). I have a good backup system * so I wasn't too concerned (although this was my first real test).  I had run smartctl on the first sign of trouble and it didn't give any errors, so it didn't appear to be a hard disk failure. I figure this is an opportunity for me to setup 64bit version of Ubunt and I've also been thinking about dual booting to Windows ® because Steam looks like an easy and cheap way to install games. I put an old version of Windows XP in the drive and... it blue screened.  It just didn't want to install.  I tried two other versions and it also failed.  I then got the Ubuntu disk and it installed with no problems.  I tried Windows again, again it failed to install even though I had reformatted ...

Today I got a little sidetracked while working on my key-train (keyboard training) project.  I thought I might spruce it up a little by using a seven segment display for the digits (say for the words per minutes), similar to what kTouch has.  I found an open source font, but it appears to be difficult to just use a ttf font in GTK. So I figured, it's only 10 images, I'll just make them in svg. I vaguely remembered a heathenx inkscape podcast  describing how to make an LCD display and decided to use that at my base. Unfortunately, they didn't provide any source files in the show-notes (as far as I could see) so I had to watch and redo the drawings myself! By naming each of the seven segments I could create the 10 digits simply by deleting a few elements in one template svg file .  I can create the template as beautiful as I like and quickly create the 10 derived images with these programs . Unfortunately, both ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick don't hand...

Well I've done it again, started another open source project . Renata and I want Victor to learn how to touch type, but these days, it's hard to find a school that teaches just that. So I looked at what available in open source and found KTouch .  It's pretty good however I found some issues with it: The lecture files aren't very obvious. It's not clear, for example, that it has already loaded the default lecture file. The keyboard is rather plain looking. The scrolling text area you type in is nifty, but gets in the way for advanced users.  My typing speed is limited to how fast it can scroll back.  Also, as you get near the end of the line it's becomes difficult to see what characters are coming up, slowing you down and creating additional errors. Like many other typing tutor programs, it shows only one line of text at a time, it's not obvious how many lines you have left to do. The first time I ran it I thought it was going to go on forever. It doe...

I saw this week that Meet the Gimp is using my keyboard monitor program and gave me nice plug as well. It was thrill, but bittersweet, since key-mon still doesn't support the Wacom table (and I don't know how to fix it ). I also feel it could look a little better (at least that I can fix).

Street view has some great shot's of Lennoxville. Bishop's University View Larger Map Lion's Pub View Larger Map Also of the the house I grew up in in Montreal. Exibir mapa ampliado No street view for Kingston yet. But there's this areal view of where I used to go windsurfing. Exibir mapa ampliado