Today a rather strange thing happened to me, I typed one another dev’s DAS Keyboard so my mind switched into full on touch typing mode, this lasted about 20 seconds before I started typing DVORAK instead of QWERTY (I can touch type both layouts – ironically I’m typing this on QWERTY). I’ve also been trying since around 1999 or 2000 to switch to the DVORAK layout but I almost without fail revert to QWERTY after a few weeks. I don’t revert because DVORAK is simply too hard or too slow because I’ve actually managed to build up my DVORAK touch typing speed to something that is almost useable. 

There are certain trends in the IT industry that just bugs me (and believe me that’s an understatement, ask anybody who’s had a similar conversation with me!) for instance the worst possible technology will be the industry standard! There are many examples of this, I’ll leave this as an “exercise” for you “the reader” to research. Back to the topic at hand, QWERT vs DVORAK is an excellent example – now I realise that some of you will claim that my statement is false and there is no scientific proof blah blah blah, I’m drawing on personal experience and in MY OPINION QWERTY sucks! Personally I like the way DVORAK feels while typing and that is why I believe that the worst layout is the standard. If you’ve read this far you might think that this is going to be another lecture on why you have to switch to DVORAK, let me assure you it is not!

So why am I mad as hell? There is a force that keeps me from my favorite keyboard layout and I wish I could eliminate it, unfortunately I do not think I’ll be able to. What’s my current options to get onto the DVORAK layout? I can use a soft switch by changing my keyboard layout on the OS layer, this might be fine for your average user that lives on a single machine or at worst case have a machine at home and a machine at work. In my case my home machine is also my work machine so theoretically I should have my cake and eat it? Another alternative is to buy a hardwired DVORAK keyboard, not only are these hard to find, some of them are just plain silly looking, tacky or very expensive . If there’s another one I’ve missed let me know in the comments I’d like to investigate it!

Interestingly neither of these actually solve my problem. I’m a laptop user, I’ve got a MacBook Pro to be exact, I’m also a Microsoft developer which means I spend a lot of my time using VMWare to run windows, not only that I work on many server environments via remote desktop and I even remote to some of my other Mac’s. The servers I use are shared machines which other developers use too and they are not DVORAK users either. So the first problem is that when I switch my Mac to the DVORAK layout it’s all fun and games until I move to windows VMWare will treat my keyoard as QWERTY regardless of what the Mac thinks it’s using, and right fully so the hardware is wired for QWERTY so it makes perfect sense, it’s virtualised and not dependent on any Mac settings. My real issue starts with the remote desktop connections, if Windows is set to use DVORAK remote desktop will blatantly ignore this and treat my keyboard as QWERTY – this does not make sense since it’s NOT virtualised and I’m merely sending the remote machine keystrokes! Suddenly I have to switch every machine I connect to to DVORAK when I only want my own machine to be switched and send the keystrokes as DVORAK instead of QWERTY to the machines I connect to. This works well when I’m using a terminal and ssh into a remote machine, why does this not work for other remote connections?

Another problem with the DVORAK layout is that short cut keys are usually chosen for their location on they keyboard or due to their relation to each other, undo, cut, copy and paste for example. DVORAK scatters these keys all over the keyboard so it makes no sense using them anymore and you loose all the benefits of using DVORAK instantly. There’s a partial solution to this with DVORAK layouts that switch to QWERTY when you hit the command key on the apple (I’ve not been able to find the windows equivalent yet, but it does not matter since windows produces too many other headaches besides this one). Don’t even get me started on trying to use EMACS or Vim (I use both I’m not religious!) on DVORAK keyboard, things go bad VERY quickly!

So my solution to this, and this is a theoretical solution I highly doubt I’d be able to find a practical implementation of it anywhere:

Change my laptop keyboard layout on a firmware (possibly even hardware, but I don’t believe it’s required) level, but I don’t want a standard DVORAK layout because of the short cut keys issue. Come to think of it if windows copied more of Mac OS X you might actually be able to globally remap all short cut keys to DVORAK equivalents. This might only get you part way there since there’s other issues on Mac OS X that will prevent you from doing this since Cocoa provides this magic and Carbon apps will give you the proverbial finger! The only way this solution will actually function properly will be when implemented on a lower level than the OS and even then it will be far from perfect.

So in conclusion DVORAK will ultimately be an EPIC fail, this sucks and gets my blood boiling, I really do like the DVORAK layout and in a perfect world there would be no QWERTY short cut keys would have been designed around DVORAK so all the counter arguments would also go away. Personally I feel DVORAK is better because on a subconscious level I automatically switch to it even though I spend 99.9% of my time typing on QWERTY. So if you’re thinking about switching to DVORAK I can honestly not recommend it unless you’re living on an isolated computer (which might be fine for most people).

DVORAK FAIL </ Rant>

P.S. Please prove me wrong! I’d like nothing more!

P.P.S. You might have noticed that I did not mention Linux in this post, I’ve given up on Linux many years ago due to the amount of pain associated with it (I did try DVORAK on it though and it sucked back then), my linux pain argument could fill a book so I refuse to go into it!

A little background first, this post has been in draft for almost a month now, I keep putting it off which is a little ironic, but the great thing about GTD is that you just need to renegotiate with yourself and it’s all good! The other strange thing about me blogging about GTD is that I’m probably the least organised person you’ll meet for a long time! Hopefully my post will inspire others like me to get a little bit more organised, it’s worth it!

Having said all of that I’m still terrible at practicing GTD and I really do wish I was better at it, but enough about that here’s the grunt:

Why a post on GTD?

That’s easy to answer (and yes I know every man and his dog blogs about GTD), it’s great, it works, and it has saved my skin many times already.

Why use GTD?

I’m not going to try and convince you that GTD is the best thing since sliced bread since it took me quite a while to really take to it, and even now I’m not “black belt” but I’m getting better. Once upon a time I used to work for a boss, life was great all I had to do was show up at work, do some stuff and I get paid, sometimes I didn’t do stuff and I still got paid. Now that I’m running my own software outfit life is a little different, if I don’t do stuff I don’t get paid! This of course creates a need to Get Things Done…

I’ll explain why it took me such a long time to really take to the concept first. When I was working at my last employer I started to read “Getting Things Done” because I was bored and had no work to do (again the irony is not lost on me). So naturally I got all excited about the prospect of actually getting things done, so I set my trusted system up did the whole go around the house and find everything that needs doing (if you read the book you’ll know). So that was step one done, I collected all my “empty loops”.

Then came the processing bit, now suddenly I had a whole lot of boring stuff around the house to do and some stuff at work to do. I never got round to doing most of the boring house stuff – some of it is still on my list (other things I’ve conveniently dropped off). The work stuff got done though, but there was a problem.

I was paid a whole heap of money each month to do some work, it turns out I didn’t actually do that much work, using GTD I got all my work done for the week in 4 hours (whoops!!), it turns out that you can bulk your time easily by surfing the web (then once the admins block your favorite sites, you can easily eat up 40 hours a week by playing nethack – no-one even knew!). This left me with a moral dilemma, do I use GTD and realise how little work I do, or do I go back to my old ways and pretend that I didn’t know (a little note about this though, being fairly efficient at writing code and knowing when to generate code and when not too does help a lot with the amount of work you get done – I still out produced the other developers in the company).

So naturally I started spending a lot of time playing with all the different GTD tools available to me for free to try and find the perfect one (I spent more time playing with tools than doing any actual work!). I also ended up dropping GTD due to a guilty conscience! Eventually the lack of doing any real work got to me and I quit my job, started contracting and I’ve not looked back yet!

Here’s a list of systems I’ve tried:

• lo tech – paper based (this was too much effort for me!)
• Monkey GTD and other GTD systems based on tiddeleywiki
• Thinking Rock (this one is quite nice actually – very functional)
• Things (It was great to start with but I reached it’s limits very quickly, never tried it with the iPhone app though!)
• iGTD 2
• Midnight Inbox (it was only in beta though to be fair!)
• PyGTD (Not sure if you can still find this, it’s a python script that operates on text files – good fun but again too much effort)
• OmniFocus (My personal favorite)

So how did I get back to GTD? Well as I progressed in my life as a consultant I ended up roping in a few of my good old buddies to help me out with the work load and I somehow ended up having to manage people and tasks and I started context switching like it’s going out of fashion. Naturally I figured GTD would help with the problem I’m having, again I started looking at tools and I kind of used it. It was still a struggle though and I only actually used GTD when I really needed it, this usually meant that I’m about to drown if I don’t do something about it and quickly too. So in a way I did learn something from reading the book but obviously I did not get the main point behind it, GTD is meant to be stress free. I only practiced it when the stress levels were so high that I’d have a mental breakdown unless I used GTD.

So why is it so difficult to get into GTD? For me the answer is simple I move around a lot and I’m not always at my computer where I keep my trusted system. This means the system only works some of the time and the time I’m “off line” it breaks down – the mental set back from this is actually a lot worse than I realised!

I finally bit the bullet and bought OmniFocus (both for the Mac and for the iPhone). OmniFocus is by far the best GTD tool I’ve ever used, and I don’t even use it the way it’s intended to I’m still not really using contexts the way they are supposed to be used. OmniFocus for the iPhone is a different beast and I would not use it on it’s own (even though a lot of people do this). The iPhone counter part is not that easy to use and will put you off GTD if that’s your primary GTD system. Using OmniFocus for the Mac in conjunction with the iPhone is as close to perfect as I can find at this time. It’s great I can take my system with me where ever I go and I usually do most of my task entering on the Mac, synchronization over wifi seals the deal! Now when I’m out and about and I need to capture something quickly I shove it in my inbox (which practically lives in my pocket) and I process it later when I get to the Mac and sync! All of this means I can tick my tasks off as I go on my iPhone and really keep on top of things.

So thanks to OmniFocus for the Mac and iPhone I can actually say that I’m practicing GTD (and I say practicing because I’m still really bad at it, but at least things are moving forward). If you’re a Mac head like me, you own all the hardware and you’re keen on GTD but you are struggling – I suggest you buy the software and start getting more productive!

So when I say that I’m suck at GTD it’s not because I don’t use my digital system, it’s because my system is virtually non-existent in meat-space. I’ve got an inbox, and a filing cabinet but it gets used only when it absolutely needs to be used – this is of course bad. The only thing saving my bacon in meat-space is the digital reminders of pressing issues in meat-space.

I do realise that each person has their own preference for GTD software, this is my preference. I do not suggest you drop your system, if it works for you then stick to it! You can take away from this post what ever you wish – read it with a grain of salt since I’m naturally Biased towards anything Mac and iPhone and I do not expect others to be that way too (then again if you’ve talked to me in person I’ve probably already tried to convince you to buy a Mac and some of you probably already have!). I just wanted to share a little bit of my experience using GTD with you and I hope you found it interesting if not useful.

Please leave comments if something is unclear or I just missed the whole point! 

Thanks for reading!

—–

On monday 21 April 2008 at round 2pm while talking on the phone I started up a Parallels VM. I looked away for a few seconds only to find the machine had gone to sleep. I did the usual wiggle of the mouse but the machine didn’t wake up. At this point I was perplexed, but never mind sometimes the machine does crash. So I restarted it and attempted to bring the VM back up again. This time I was greeted with “NTLDR not found”.

Surely this is not a big deal I’ve seen this a few times with windows and did a quick google to see if there’s a fix for it. Satisfied that another user has had the same experience I thought nothing of it and decided to go shopping for a couple of new office chairs.

Upon my return I attempted to boot the virtual machine from the windows XP media so I could use the recovery console to fix the broken boot loader. The boot failed, how could this be? It’s only a virtual machine it should boot from CD. I decided to do a little further investigation, maybe I can mount the image using the parallels explorer utility. 

To my dismay I was informed that the disk was the wrong format. WHAT? the wrong format? Surely parallels can read their own format? In a panic I checked the vhd file size and realised that 2 gig was a little small for something that used to be 22 gig. My worst fears had come true, I checked to see if I had a backup, but wait I attempted to back it up a week ago but stopped half way through because something pressing came up and I decided to deal with that instead. Being able to find a backup of everything else on the machine except the 1 file I desperately need as it contains the only copy of the source code of a $40,000 project was a slight problem.

First thing that came to mind was to email parallels support to see if they could do anything for me. Next I called a data recovery company (they claim that if they can’t recover it no-one can). After talking to them I realise that I was going to be in for about $900-$2500 worth of cost for them to recover the file for me. I thought to myself this is ok, the data is worth a lot more than the amount of money they want, to get it back. They have a no fix no fee policy. So the very next morning I dropped my laptop off with them so they can “clone” my disk and attempt to recover the VHD.

The consultant assured me that they would be able to recover my data as it sounded like a typical issue. There was nothing physically wrong with the disk when their lab tech had a look at it so that gave me hope. 

First thing I did was to go out and buy a mac mini to set up as a source code repository, seeing as how I didn’t set up a repository server as I was using Mercurial locally and I have not had any problems with my virtual machines to date. Keep in mind that just the previous week I got sick of my Netgear ADSL router dropping out all the time and got a Cisco 857 ADSL router (very happy with it but that’s another story).

It took me all day getting mercurial configured and SSH (on Mac OS and using putty on windows) configured to work the way I wanted it to work. After I got it all configured I pushed all the source code that was not on that particular VM (I keep 2 virtual machines, one for personal development and one for commercial, funnily enough the personal development one was backed up 3 days before) to the mac mini and optimistically awaiting the return of my data (They claim to be the best).

On thursday 24 April 2008 at around 9:30 am I receive another phone call from the data recovery company. I was crossing my fingers and eyes in hope of good news. The news was bad, the worst news I had in a long time. They were unable to recover my file! I nearly broke down in tears. This could mean the end of me, my young consulting company will surely go bankrupt because of this. How could I be so stupid, I always preach backup your data to everybody!

Having to go see a customer I make my way to their office but on the way there I realise that I might be able to reverse engineer the binaries which I do have in my sent email, and that’s stored on the server! Great idea, so I call a friend who tells me to use Reflector, instead of buying something expensive. So I talked to the customer (who’s code i didn’t lose – I made a backup and gave it to someone else a while back, but only made one very small change since then) Still wanting to cry but keeping it together.

When I got home I started to download decompilation tools like my life depended on it. I started to decompile the first DLL and it worked, well kinda, the code was almost correct and looked almost exactly the way I wrote it!

This was good news. I decompiled all the dlls I had and grabbed the web files (this is an ASP.net 2.0 application). I started to change the aspx files to include the codefile attribute, renamed the .cs files from the decompilation, changed the class declarations to partial, removed the redundant code that the compiler complained about. Almost there…

I was missing the web.config and web.sitemap files – luckily for me I messed up and accidently included these in a build that I sent out to the customer a few days earlier, so I recovered them from that build (I produced custom ones for the production environment and excluded them from the package because their IT guy would botch the job if I didn’t). One more critical piece is missing in the puzzle, the Database as it happens these are easy to recover, just grab a backup of an existing copy, thankfully I have a copy of this on a development sever on site with the customer. I grabbed my DB and eureka! the application works flawlessly.

Now everything is not fine and dandy, there was some code that I commented out to disable certain features, these are gone now. But it was a good thing that I tried to disable as much as I could programatically to keep the integrity of the code in tact. I’d say I have about 99% of the code back. The other issue is that all local variable names are very generic like str str2 str3 etc. It’s good thing that Im lazy to write comments because they make themselves known just by the way I wrote the code. I can easily restore these using the Visual Studio re-factoring commands. Since I’m the only developer working on the code and there’s some changes that needs to be made in the future I will fix these up as I need to. The customer is none the wiser and I have learnt a lesson I will never forget.

I went out and bought a 500 gig Time Capsule to ensure that the mac mini source control server will be backed up without issue, I’m also backup up all my other macs to it. I still need to write a batch file to automatically commit and push all my source automatically, make DB backups and copy document directories to my NAS. Then I can run this script either manually or on a scheduled task to keep myself backed up.

The other thing I should do is to configure a boot-camp partition so that I have the safety of a real file system instead of a file system in a file. If I had a boot-camp partition I would have recovered 100% of the data easily myself.

My next purchase is a UPS to ensure that I do not get bitten by a power spike and I will look into an offsite backup solution too. This has been an extremely painful and expensive lesson to learn. The moral of the story is to never have a false sense of security, and remember disaster will always strike when you least expect it. Back your data up as often as you can and make sure you test your back up strategy. I’ve been caught with my pants down on this one and I got lucky in the end. I did how ever loose 4 days of work because of this which I now need to make up some how. The good thing is that I hopefully have a more secure work environment and I will not get caught out again, you never know how valuable your data is until you loose it!

—–

I’m a lot smarter than I was back the now and my backups are solid, I can loose my entire laptop and recover everything that’s valuable on it from my backups. My consulting company does not just consist of me anymore so the source control system I’ve got in place actually deals with a lot more than just me and yes it’s still a mac mini and a time capsule. We have a lot of code on it and it still functions well enough to not be an issue. I’ve actually had to explain my backup strategy to a customer which I was too eager to do since the code is pretty safe given multiple developers using mercurial plus the mac mini/time capsule combination. I hope that you have learnt something from my painful experience and audit your backup strategy. I cannot begin to drive home how painful this was!

Some background! Every night when I get home from work and greet my better half we generally start on the same old timeless argument “What’s for dinner?”. Tonight I was the last one home, I started my quest or mission on my iPhone googling for a deep fried mars bar. I was told to stop playing and go use a laptop to do it properly.

I spent about 30 minutes unable to find a deep fried mars bar for sale in Auckland (New Zealand) – granted my Googling skills are not the best on the block but I can generally find what I’m looking for. Then a great idea comes from my better half who’s no internet guru by a long shot, but she does have her moments, and this is a biggie! “Why don’t you ask on twitter?” What a great idea! So I put the word out “I’m on a mission I’m looking for a deep-fried #mars_bar in Auckland! Please RT” I tagged it so that I can do a search later (at the time I didn’t realise that I’m going to blog about this event). A few minutes later I get this “@ebenbruyns Fish and Chip shop on Riddell Rd in Glendowie. Never tasted them though.“. Great a quick look on google maps indicate that it’s only around 6 km away from where I live (how great is that!). So out goes the word “@antnzdotcom Thanks, I’m going there right now I’ll update on the deep fried #mars_bar when I get back. Twitter FTW!!!“.

So the results of this little experiment: 30 minutes of searching Google left me empty handed, in about the same amount of time I did the “twitter search” and I made it to the shop, check out the google street view:
Embedding does not seem to work so click this link!

Success

The Results

What’s the story without giving a review of the food? Well here you go: Snapper was the same as everywhere else, chips was good, scallops was not all that great (I blame the batter), squid rings were great last but most important the fried moro bar (yeah I know, not a mars bar but I’ve never actually had a deep fried mars bar, the one I got last year in Palmerston North was actually a moro bar too!) not as good as the one I had in Palmy the batter was not on par with the only other deep fried chocolate bar I’ve ever had. Over all I think it was a successful run and a very interesting story to boot!

In closing, I set out trying to find a deep fried mars bar (I really really wanted it!), google left me empty handed (not the kinda thing you search in google anyway?) but twitter came to the rescue – Yes I have a decent sized group I follow and that follow me in return, but I’m sure that it’s not that hard building your twitter presence to the size of mine (it’s tiny in comparison to the masters!). I think it’s a great world we have today, I managed to find something within minutes which I couldn’t find by conventional means. I was able to update on my progress while out on the road (via my trusty iPhone 3G), I was able to determine where and how far away the shop in minutes too! I did all of this with web 2.0 and the iPhone!

Now that I’ve written this, nobody will ever read it! Just like all the technical documentation I’ve written as a Software Developer!