From a postcard addressed to RESIDENT:

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directorys & Nathaniel P. Ford, Sr., Executive Director/CEO invite you to join the Community Celebration:

Saturday, April 14, 2007
10:00am-4:00pm
(Official program begins at 11:00am)
K.C. Jones Park
5701 Third Street, San Francisco
Carroll Avenue Station
(Note: The Thunderbird will run every 20 minutes)

Special Guests:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi
U.S. House of Representatives
Mayor Gavin Newsom
City and County of San Francisco

Woohoo!! Nancy Pelosi … I’m going to check this out.

Link to Thunderbird on SFMTA
Link to Nancy Pelosi on Wikipedia

Filed under: san francisco, support, upcoming | 0 Comments

I keep giving the same advice to people who ask me about RSI, so I’m writing up some ideas here. Remember, I’m not a doctor, and this is not medical advice.

• If you are in serious pain, stop typing. Really. Completely stop using a computer, at least for a while. See a medical professional and talk to your friends who are going through the same thing. Here are some things your doctor might recommend if you are diagnosed wtih tendonitis:
  
  • Ice packs to reduce swelling of your tendons. Bags of frozen peas work. Use a towel so they aren’t too cold. Do not exceed ten minutes. Do *not* type while your arms are cold. Use as needed.
  • Wrist guards, the kind that peliom recommends. Wear them while typing. Wear them while sleeping. Yes, really. It helps a lot.
  • Ibuprofen also reduces swelling. Use as prescribed.
  • Tendon stretches and exercises, several times a day.
  • Lots of breaks, early and often.
  • Squeezy stress ball.
  • Stop typing.
    
• OK, so you decided to ignore my advice and keep using a computer. No one ever stops. At least set up your computer to be as ergonomic as possible, and reduce use.
  
  • STOP WEB BROWSING. Also stop non-work related emails. Most people I know keep hurting their wrists doing stupid shit like surfing the web several hours a day. If you must surf, do it on a blackberry, sidekick, or a tablet pc.
  • Stop using your laptop keyboard and trackbad. Don’t use a laptop at the coffee shop, on the couch, or in bed. Use an external keyboard and pointing device.
  • You need to work at a properly adjusted desk with a properly adjusted chair. You want someone who knows what they are doing to make some measurements so that your workstation fits your body. Actually, you want at least three people to make the same measurements, because at least one of them will give you bad advice.
  • You will most likely need a keyboard tray, but really this depends a lot on your body proportions. A fully adjustable one will cost at least $200. We’ve been using the $220 one from Anthro.
  • You will most likely have to raise your monitor up to be at eye level.
  • You will most likely have to rip the armrests off your chair. Armrests are horrible if you have RSI. Same goes for wristrests. Your arms and wrists should float.
  • Learn how to roll up on your sit bones, so your back and neck are held straight without effort. Learning how to sit correctly helps a lot. You shouldn’t be slouching, but you don’t need to use muscle to correct bad posture. You shouldn’t be leaning on the back of the chair while you type.
    
• General keyboard advice:
  
  • Do *not* use a laptop keyboard. A laptop is not ergonomic. Here is a test: Try using an external keyboard on a well-adjusted keyboard tray. Did your wrists hurt less than when using the laptop? If so, your laptop keyboard is hurting you. Stop using it.
  • Ergonomic split keyboards are good.
  • Zero force multitouch keyboards like the TouchStream are great, but no longer on the market. They use gestures to reduce pinky-reaches and other kinds of hand stretching, which is a huge win. They cost a lot on eBay.
    
• General pointing device advice:
  
  • Stop using your laptop touchpad. At the very least, carry a bluetooth mouse with you.
  • Move your mouse to the to other side. If most your RSI is in your right hand, and you mouse with your right hand, move the mouse to the left side.
  • Try replacing the mouse with a trackball or a vertical mouse.
  • Replace the mouse with a Wacom tablet. Holding a stylus or pen is much more ergonomic than a mouse.
  • Try keeping a Wacom tablet on one side and a mouse on the other. Lots of different input methods = good.
    
• General handwriting recognition advice
  
  • It helps supplement typing.
  • It’s hard to write code using handwriting reconition, but not so hard to write emails.
  • Easy to get started: built into OS X and tablet PCs. Wacom 4×5 tables are $80 or less.
    
• General voice recognition advice
  
  • Not for programmers
  • It moves RSI from your wrists to your throat.
  • It is hard to problem-solve and speak at the same time.
  • Give it a try if everything else fails.
    
• Update: Advice on choosing a keyboard
  
  • Overuse of your pinky fingers can aggravate your RSI. Keyboards such as the Kinesis Contoured move modifier keys to your thumbs, which helps reduce pinky usage.
  • Gesture keyboards like the Touchstream are even better at reducing pinky reaches, but difficult to find and have a longer learning curve.
    
    • Backspace, Delete, Enter, Space relocated to thumb keys.
    • Modifier Key gestures for Shift, Command, Control, Option/Alt.
    • Editing and Navigation gestures reduce stretching your hand to hit modifier+letter combos.
    • Programmers’ keypad (simlar to numlock keypad) reduces pinky reaches for symbols.
      
  • At the very least, re-map your primary modifier key to be a thumb modifier, instead of a pinky modifier. The command key on a standard macintosh keyboard is a thumb modifier; the control key on a standard pc keyboard is a pinky modifier. Pinky reaches = bad for RSI.
    

OK, who has more advice?

Filed under: medicine, support | 3 Comments
Tagged: multitouch

Viacom hates children. That is just sick.

Filed under: sucky companies | 1 Comment

I just got the Sticker Nation book and love it! It’s filled with 435 stickers designed by Srini Kumar of unamerican.com. My desk now says I ♥ Source Code and my TV says SET ME FREE. My favorite one is this one:

It’s only 10 bucks on Amazon and it’s made by a Kumar, so you know that it is BEST QUALITY!

Filed under: books | 4 Comments

Filed under: science, video | 3 Comments

or so it seems because I got 2 flats again yesterday! That’s the second time in about a month that I’ve gotten two flat tires within a couple hours of each other. Luckily my flats have happened on Sunday rides which I do with a lifecycle group (instead of when I’m out in the middle of nowhere by myself) so I’ve had support from super nice people who stopped to help (and even offered a spare tube when my tire blew out a second time to get me back on the road really quickly! thanks Sabine! thanks Tia!!) Although I always carry a spare tube and pump with me, I’ve now resolved to carry at least 2 tubes and 2 CO2 cartridges on every ride (if for no other reason than to be able to stop and help someone else if they need it!)

Anyways, this Saturday I didn’t go on a ride because I’ve been recovering from a nasty cold / flu so no pics this weekend unfortunately. I did make it out yesterday with my regular group though and we rode from San Francisco to China Camp in San Rafael and then along Lucas Valley road to Nicasio and back (about 70 miles). It was a gray drizzly day and the flat tires made it even harder. But in the end I was super happy because it was my first long ride with clipless pedals and I managed to stay upright all the way. yay!

Filed under: cycling | 2 Comments

I saw an awesome pickup truck this morning … sorry, no picture. But it was an old school pickup, teal colored with “Tiki Go Go” in fabulous Tiki fonts. It turns out to be Chef Kelley Hawks. The food looks super good, but at $350/person for 5 entrees, I think I’m going to stick with almond butter on a whole wheat english muffin. “A thoughtful gift for new parents or newlyweds” … Neither of those are on the horizon but feel free to buy it for me anyway!

Filed under: bay area, food, tiki lifestyle | 2 Comments
Tagged: family

via Money Magazine, you can decode the pricing status of items at some retailers.

• At Target, prices ending in “8″ means the item is on its markdown cycle. Prices ending in “4″ are as low as they will go.
• At Gap and Radio Shack, prices ending in “7″ mean clearance price.
• At at “office superstore” an employee says to wait until the price ends in “.04,” which is the lowest price.
• You can learn more about price hacking at consumerist.com

Alas, Amazon.com doesn’t have everything. Until they do we have to deal with these crappy retailers.

Link to Consumerist.com

Filed under: lifehacking | 0 Comments

Today my AVR USBKey dev board finally came and I’m on my way to making an open source clone of my beloved TouchStream keyboard. I’m using the Cypress CapSense parts for the multitouch sensing and AVR parts for doing the processing and communication. The first prototypes will have most the processing done in software, actually, and then I’ll decide between AVR and ARM7 later.

Here is the roadmap:

1. Write OSX userspace app to communicate with AVR over USB and emulate mouse/scroll wheel
2. Prototype (onetouch) CapSense slider using Cypress PSoC chip
3. Have PSoC chip communicate with AVR using SPI or CAN bus
4. Implement slider that emulates scroll wheel that I can attach to the side of a Cinema Display (using userspace app for processing).
5. Prototype small 2D multitouch touchpad using one PSoC chip communicating with AVR
6. Make larger 2D multitouch surface with multiple PSoC drivers, all talking to the AVR
7. Work on gesture recognition code in the userspace app
8. Port gesture code to the AVR or ARM7
9. Get keyboard to work as a HID device without drivers or the userspace control app.
10. Done with version one!

Filed under: all talk, no code, tronix | 5 Comments
Tagged: multitouch

I spent *days* hunting for the perfect keyboard tray, and couldn’t find any decent reviews. Then peliom told me he was getting this keyboard tray from Anthro, so of course I bought the same one. Here are my thoughts:

• It installs quickly. 20 minutes drilling 10 holes and screwing it in. Unfortunately it comes with hex screws, which I didn’t have a drill bit for, so I had to screw them in by hand.
• You can’t just push it up and down like a higher-end model; you have to loosen the spring hinge first.
• It’s built solid and glides smoothly, but it doesn’t use roller bearings and wobbles left/right a bit in the slide track.
• The mouse pad can be relocated to either side. I removed it entirely because I use a TouchStream.
• The wrist guard is stuck on with a bit of glue. I ripped it off because resting your wrists on anything is bad if you have RSI.
• It costs $220, which is a bit less than the others I was looking at.
• I am much happier with it than without it.
• If you have RSI and don’t have a decent ergonomic setup, talk to someone about it ASAP.

Filed under: old timers | 1 Comment

Last Saturday, I went on a pretty bike ride starting in Petaluma along Chileno Valley Road to the coast and then back. It was a perfect day! Along the way, I saw cows, horses, an alpaca, bunnies, a turtle, goats, sheep, a snake, black birds with bright red cheeks, blue jays, carniverous looking birds with huge wing spans and some other animals I’m forgetting right now. The ride was 56 miles with about 1,800 feet of climbing, so it’s sort of long but not overly strenuous.

Here’s a map and route directions for anyone else that wants to go!

Driving Directions to Starting Point
Take the 101 North to Petaluma and exit Petaluma Boulevard South. Drive north 2 miles and make a left (west) on Western Avenue. Drive 2.2 miles and then turn left on Chileno Valley Road. Drive .8 mile to Helen Putnam Regional Park on the left. (the sign for the park is facing the opposite way so it’s easy to miss…if you go more than 1 mile after you get on Chileno Valley Road w/o seeing the park, turn around and you’ll be sure to see it. It costs $5 to park in the small lot but you can also park on the opposite side of the road for free).

Route Directions
0.0 Park at Helen Putnam Park and ride west on Chileno Valley Road.
3.0 Turn RIGHT to stay on Chileno Valley Road.
12.6 LEFT on Tomales-Petaluma Road.
13.8 RIGHT on Alexander Road.
14.8 RIGHT on Fallon-Two Rock Road.
17.2 LEFT on Petaluma-Valley Ford Road
26.0 LEFT on Valley Ford Estereo Road (in the town of Valley Ford…this small road can be easy to miss…make sure you don’t continue onto HWY 1)
31.8 RIGHT on Dillon Beach Road. Ride out and back to Dillon Beach and then turn around to return to the junction with Valley Ford Road.
34.6 RIGHT on Dillon Beach Road
37.2 RIGHT on Shoreline Highway (Hwy 1) in the town of Tomales. Make sure you get some foccaccia at the bakery!! it’s really good!
37.5 LEFT on Tomales-Petaluma Road.
42.7 RIGHT on Chileon Valle7 Road.
52.3 LEFT to stay on Chileno Valley Road.
55.5 Arrive at starting point.

Route directions are from this excellent book which I highly recommend Northern California Biking: 150 of the Best Road and Trail Rides

Filed under: bay area, cycling, excursions | 3 Comments

Sometimes you just want to post a code snippet or some xml on your blog, but WordPress borks the formatting. So we installed the iG Syntax Hilighter, which mostly works great. It uses GeSHi under the hood.

But sometimes, the syntax highlighter does too much highlighting. I wrote a minimal GeSHi language file for ‘nocode’, which basically lets me use the syntax highlighter like a glorified pre tag. No more worrying about wptexturize() pulling a Swedish Chef on your post! Here is the language file if you want to use it:

Filed under: code code, no code | 2 Comments
Tagged: php

I’ve been spending many hours criss-crossing the city on public transit lately, and I’ve decided I don’t like those MUNI buses shrinkwrapped in gigantic ad banners. They’re like billboards on wheels, except even larger, and somehow even more lame.

We’re doomed to live with both billboard and advertising-wrapped buses, right? Well, maybe not.

What if San Francisco banned billboards, like some other communities do? The cost of putting giant ads on the side of a bus would go up, and MUNI would get more money, and maybe they would use the extra money to make their service suck less. And we would have no billboards, expect the ones on wheels. What do you think?

Note that in real life, I don’t think banning stuff is a good idea, even if the stuff is lame, like billboards. I also don’t think MUNI would actually use the extra money to help me get around the city any faster.

Filed under: all talk, san francisco, transportation | 1 Comment
Tagged: muni

Did you know Ted finally got a pup?! Look at lil Moxie go go go!!

Filed under: cuuuuute, video | 3 Comments

So, I wish I could give you guys a run down of last week at SXSW, but my brain is still a little fried from it all, so I can only say I had an awesome time and met lots of super interesting people, one of whom gave me this funny business-card-sticker and whose name i totally forgot so I googled the only word on it today and voila!…I find that he’s an artist and video-podcaster for Make magazine and has a blog called “I Make Things.” Anyways, SXSW was full of moments like these where almost everyone I met was working on something neat and there was no shortage of interesting conversations.

Also, I know you guys are skeptical but Austin is a totally fun place! I mean how can you not love a town that’s the birthplace and headquarters for Whole Foods as well as a major center for artery-clogging-all-you-can-eat-big-ass-barbecue!!

And did I mention there were robots?!

Filed under: all talk | 2 Comments

I wrote a plugin that lets us use UseMod Wiki’s formatting syntax to format posts more easily… You can read more about it here. It’s already installed here, so go nuts!

I’m sure the first thing that jumped into your head is why not just use MarkDown? Well, I don’t like MarkDown’s link format. UseMod’s is much easier!

Compare Markdown:

And UseMod links:

Also,

• I like the way
  
  • UseMod syntax
    
    • lets me easily create sublists
      

Filed under: code code | 0 Comments
Tagged: php

Dodger came over yesterday with a Vex Robotics kit and we prototyped a Shaker Robot! It’s the first step in making a a fully-robotic tiki bar. We got the robot shaker to kind of shake up a drink, so we declared it sucessful and went to celebrate at Jasmine Tea House with mang and about 20 other people. Yay! Here are some notes for going forward:

• The current design calls for dressing up the shaker in a hula skirt and a coconut bra. For this to work well, we need to move the pivot point to the center.
• I was thinking about carving a wooden cam for some janky rotation-to-linear translation, but I think using a solenoid might make more sense, because then we can sync the shaker to music!
• We need to write some tiki music that our robot can play while shaking up a drink.
• We could also make a hula dancer robot that holds the shaker in her hands, but I think for now we should continue with the current plan: dressing up the shaker in a coconut bra.
• We got a lot done with our pair-hacking setup. Dodger does all the work, and I take all the credit :)

Filed under: tikibar, tronix | 3 Comments

This beautiful map of relationships between scientific paradigms was made by datamining citations in 800,000 scientific papers. It reminds me of the visual complexity site that May posted. Check out the *huge* 5.3MB jpeg. (via reddit)

Filed under: science | 0 Comments

I’ve been translating all the new perl and php scripts I write into Python and Ruby in order to learn more about those two languages. I checked some more example scripts into SourceForge, which might be useful for others who know one of these languages and want to learn a new one.

These scripts are available in perl, php, python, and ruby:

• How to query a REST web api using HTTP GET and parsing the XML response.
• How to make a system call and read the return value.
  

I’m starting to like Ruby more every day. It would be nice if Ruby and Python had a XML::Simple equivalent in their standard distributions.

Filed under: code code | 0 Comments
Tagged: example scripts , perl , php , python , ruby

I remember when I fell in love with Perl. It was the summer of 1995, and peliom and I had just met, and were working at the Lab. Postscript hacking using MacPerl on OS 8. It was beautiful.

That was more than ten years ago, and even though I’ve remained a Perl hacker the whole time, I see massive amounts of development happening on Python and Ruby, and the Perl community seems to be slowing down (what’s up with Perl 6 anyway?), so, despite the lack of block-level scope, I think it might finally be time to move on.

I don’t know enough about either Python or Ruby to figure out which to learn, so I’ll learn them both, and deal with choosing one later. Along the way I’ll post some example scripts. Anyone else making the jump from Perl or PHP to something modern might find these useful. Here is the first example: printing out a directory listing using readdir and glob in your favorite scripting language:

(more…)

Filed under: code code | 3 Comments
Tagged: example scripts , perl , php , python , ruby

The TikiRobot crew went to the Creative Commons Salon last month at Shine SF. Shine has an internet-enabled photobooth that uploads the pics it takes to Flickr. I checked it today and found this pic of us, which is very tame compared to most the Shine photobooth pics.

A Flickr photobooth.. I’m pretty sure we’re living in the future or something.

Filed under: photos | 5 Comments

Even though I never used the SourceForge compile farm, reading about its recent demise made me sad for some reason. It also made me think about the important role SourceForge plays in the Open Source world.

When SourceForge started in 1999, they provided a unique service that helped start thousands of open source projects, both large and small. Today, however, the core functionality of SF project hosting is easy to replicate by simply installing Subversion and Trac on a hosted server. A few competitors such as Google and Savannah have also sprung up. The services that SourceForge provides are no longer unique, but that’s not what makes it so important.

When software authors use a version control system like Subversion to write software, they preserve the history of all their changes. Although it is possible to preserve a log of edits in other mediums, most authors, musicians, painters, sculptors, or other “content creators” (ugh) do not save this kind of detailed history of their work.

Imagine being able to take your favorite book and roll back every change the author made, one edit at a time, so you could see the author’s thought process, and learn how a bunch of words were arranged to create something beautiful. It would be a huge learning experience for new authors. This is something that new software authors can do easily with open source software. Being able to explore fine-grain history makes software a unique kind of content. Future generations would find this information hugely valuable, just like we would find having Shakespeare’s first, second, third, fourth, and fifth drafts hugely valuable.

Open source software is worth preserving, both for its utility, and for the history it provides. Open source projects start and die out all the time, but hosting the project on SourceForge means that even if an author stops developing it, the world will still have access to it. Others would be able to look at the source code, view its history, and even incorporate the code into their own Open Source software.

SourceForge is owned by VA Software, a company that provides a great service to the Open Source world. But it is a company that can be bought by someone who might not understand the value of long-term preservation of open source software. Companies in general aren’t concerned with doing anything on a long-term scale. As far as I know, there is no one thinking about how to preserve software repositories for 100 or 1000 years. This stuff is important. How are we going to preserve it?

Filed under: all talk, archive, no code | 1 Comment

A quick look at their site says a lot.

Imagine yourself put in charge of coordinating a schoolwide process directed by this man

Starting yesterday, when I was sitting in a long training on this process, I am the WASC coordinator for my school. Basically an accreditation process that cannot be avoided. A huge morass of meetings and reports that have to be coordinated through a very opinionated faculty and staff. Seriously, there are faculty members here (remember it’s an art school) who will literally weep and wail when I assign focus groups, tasks, and the like. Much drama.

I’m pushing for a sizeable stipend for this extra role. Maybe enough to pay for Prism’s day care!

Filed under: Uncategorized | 0 Comments

I went to a nutrition workshop last night expecting an extremely boring and yet slightly motivating remix of the food pyramid for athletes.

Instead I was blown away by a rapid fire how-to-fuel-your-body talk by Dr. Clyde Wilson, and left with that feeling of “living in the bay area totally rocks.”

Clyde is one of those of those OCD professors that is crazy smart, loves teaching and optimizes every minute of his life to making the world a better place while at the same time having as much fun as possible. In philosophical terms, if there is such a thing as “The California School”, Clyde is headmaster. After high school he spent 6 years in the navy as the “supervisor for reactor chemistry and radiation control” aboard USS Carl Vinson in Alameda. His Standford PhD thesis was “Biochemistry in Single Cells Using Microfluidic Systems.” He is now teaching courses on clinical and popular nutrition at Standord and UCSF, and he is Director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the Sports Medicine Institute in Palo Alto.

Reading Clyde’s website, which I highly recommend, is a deluge of facts and figures about why and how we should eat and how to make it simple. It is ironic that by following his obsessive regime you actually become less obsessive about reading labels, the right thing just happens automatically. And Clyde jokes that he loves pineapple juice and root beer floats, being healthy doesn’t mean not having fun.

Pinapple Juice!!!!

This guy is one of us …. so check out his

• Vision Statement
• Excellent FAQ on Sports Nutrition
• Crazy Helpful Downloads Page
• Seminar Calendar

Link to Dr Clyde Wilson’s Website

Filed under: bay area, cycling, food, medicine | 4 Comments

Someone made this 1999… How did we share video in a time before YouTube?? Hotline servers? ICQ?? The Forum That Shall Not Be Named????

Filed under: all talk, no code, video | 2 Comments