The sorry state of keyboard interfaces (by alaric)

Back in the Dark Ages, keyboards were simple devices. Putting too much processing power in them would raise the cost unacceptably; they were kept as simple devices that told the host computer when buttons were pressed and released, and the host computer had the job of converting that into meaningful information such as entered data or commands.

In particular, keyboards didn't even know what was printed on their buttons. They told the computer what button was pressed as a "scan code", which was loosely tied to the key's position on the keyboard. Keyboards for different alphabets had different things printed on the keys, but generated the same scan codes regardless; the computer had to be told what "keyboard map" to use to convert those scan codes into letters.

This wasn't a big deal in the days of the original PC and AT keyboard interfaces, and the later PS/2 interface, where only one keyboard could be plugged into a computer; telling the computer what kind of keyboard you had wasn't a big deal.

However, by the time USB came to be, micro-controllers were sufficiently cheap that one capable of managing the USB interface to a keyboard would easily have been able to manage its own mapping to a standard set of codes based on what the key did rather than where on the keyboard it was, avoiding the need for keyboard maps. But, they didn't. Oh no. Instead, they standardised a new set of scan codes for the positions of keys on a "standard layout", regardless of what was printed on them. And of course, keyboards that don't follow the standard layout (such as compact laptop keyboards, or ergonomic ones, or keyboard emulators such as chorders) generate the scan codes for keys based on where they would be in a standard layout, meaning that the scan codes aren't really relating to anything sensible at all.

And meaning that we still need keyboard maps on the computers.

This becomes a real pain when you have more than one keyboard, which is easily done with USB - and is increasingly becoming the norm, as a laptop (with its own keyboard) is used as a desktop computer (with a nicer, external, keyboard). For a while I was using an Apple laptop, but mainly as a VM host for a NetBSD VM. The Apple laptop had an Apple keyboard, but I plugged in a USB PC keyboard. When using Mac OS software outside my VM, the laptop had the correct keymap but the external keyboard did not; when using my VM, it was the other way around. The situation sucked.

Also, I'm sure people who work with multiple languages would love to have multiple keyboards that they can switch between easily depending on what language they're typing, without having to reconfigure their keyboard map when they do so. As a nerd, I would love to be able to buy a small keypad covered in extra function keys and have it work alongside my normal keyboard (maybe even foot pedals!). How about specialist keyboards with function keys for tasks like computed-aided design?

So, here's my proposal: keyboards should identify their buttons with Unicode strings, and a type flag (glyph or function), and an optional position flag for duplicated keys (chosen from nine options: top left, top middle, top right, center, etc; a tenth value can be used for non-duplicated keys). When you press a key with "H" printed on it, the keyboard should say "glyph H is down". When you press the left shift key, the keyboard should say "function shift (bottom left) is down".

Keys with more than one glyph printed on them, corresponding to what should happen when that key is pressed with combinations of modifier keys, can be handled by the keyboard also providing a "modifier table". If I press shift+5 in the hope of getting the % sign printed above 5 on my keyboard, the keyboard should note that a shift key is pressed, then that 5 is pressed; but the modifier table should note that the keyboard's key caps will be giving the user the impression that this combination should produce a "%".

Function keys can be given any name, including useful keys such as "help", "cut", "copy", and "paste". And you can have as many soft-bindable F-keys as you want. All these rich function names can be passed through to software as-is, letting apps bind functionality to appropriately-named keys; to make this easier, there should be a shared vocabulary of function key names to avoid synonyms cropping up.

This would be easy to implement.

This would make keyboards plug-and-play.

This would make it easy to use multiple keyboards on the same computer.

This would open up new markets for keyboards with heaps of special function keys.

This could be done in a backwards-compatible manner by making keyboards expose the old USB scancodes by default, along with a note that they can be switched into Sensible Mode if the host computer supports it.

Lobby the USB implementors forum to put this into the next version of the USB HID specification now!

Vomit-induced implementations of the 9P protocol in Chicken Scheme (by alaric)

Last Saturday, I came down with what I suspect was Norovirus - the rest of the family (apart from the baby) having come down with it on Thursday and me having spent the past few days mopping up after them, this was probably unavoidable; although I'd tried my best by wearing a respirator when performing clean-up operations (it was also nice to not have to smell what I was clearing up...).

But, it meant I spent Monday off of work recuperating. I was too weak and exhausted to do any work from home, but I was bored senseless of just lying there on the sofa, so I decided to try and extend Chicken Scheme's 9p egg, which is a client implementation of the 9P2000 file server protocol, to also be able to act as a server.

This is something I want for Ugarit; it means that a Chicken Scheme app will be able to provide a virtual filesystem that can be mounted from a computer and used like your "real" filesystem. In particular, I want to be able to let people access their backed-up snapshots from a Ugarit vault as a live read-only filesystem, rather than needing to go in and manually "restore" their desired files back into the filesystem to access them. And it'll really come into its own when I implement archive mode, as it will make it possible to actually use the Ugarit archive seamlessly.

Unfortunately, being rather fuzzy-headed, I kept making rookie mistakes, but I eventually managed to get the core protocol implementation working. In doing so, I found out that a 9P server that puts incorrect lengths in the stat structures returned from directory reads causes 9P mounts in Linux to "hang" in a way that can't be unmounted and you need to power-cycle the machine as it won't even shut down cleanly... so be careful of that when mounting the few public 9P servers out there!

In order to test it, and as a utility for Chicken apps that would like to provide a 9P "control/status filesystem" in the manner of wmii et al, I started to write a simplified high-level virtual filesystem server library on top of the core server implementation. At the point where I made this status update to my friends in the Chicken Scheme IRC channel, directory listings weren't working (they now are), but you can see the idea - create a filesystem object from Scheme and register files and directories in it, and it appears as a live filesystem under UNIX.

Now I'm feeling a bit better today I've realised several other rookie errors I've made (not ones that cause bugs, I hope, but ones that complicated the code unnecessarily) - I'll fix those up before I submit all of my changes to the 9p egg's maintainer for merging in...

Then it'll be time to start on the Ugarit integration. THAT will be fun 🙂

Spring Cleaning (by alaric)

I've spent more time building infrastructure than using it, I suspect. I love building infrastructure, so I've often built it because I can; however, with everything that's happened in the past six years, I've ended up struggling to maintain the infrastructure I already had. So I've had to change tack and become much more pragmatic about my infrastructure astronautics, such as getting rid of my limited company and migrating from a tightly-bound cluster to a single box for my hosting platform.

This has given me some time to tidy up and simplify the infrastructure I want to keep.

So this weekend, I got around to rebuilding the Kitten Technologies web site. This is where I publish my open-source creations; they were all version-controlled in Subversion, and I had a PHP site with some static pages, then a dynamically generated project browser that would pull out files called VERSION.txt and README.txt from the SVN repositories to build a description page, offered up tarballs of all released versions for downloading, and linked to an SVN web interface for browsing the repo. I wanted to get around to implementing ticket tracking at some point so folks could submit tickets.

However, for a while I've ached to migrate to Fossil for version control, mainly because it has integral ticket tracking and a wiki for each project, along with integral repository browsing; it provides a fully-featured project Web site, and it's a distributed VCS to boot, which is also useful. However, I wanted it to still all look like a nice integrated site for all my projects. So what I've done is to write a Fossil skin stylesheet that has my new look in it, then to build the wrapper site using the same CSS (eg, by using Fossil's names for div classes and overall page structure), based on Hyde; the CSS is actually generated from an scss master file that Hyde processes to generate the CSS as part of the static site, which the Fossil repos just refer to. My deployment script rolls the skin out to all of my repositories whenever it's updated, so they are all kept magically in sync. It still has a few rough edges (I want to improve the navigation with a consistent site-wide nav bar above the Fossil menu bar, that has the current project highlighted; this will be slightly more complex as I'll need to make the script modify the skin for each project to highlight the correct one) and I am still incapable of making non-ugly CSS, but it means that Kitten Technologies is now live on Fossil. I've a lot of projects still to migrate, but after I've done the "fiddly" ones that need some level of manual tweaking, I hope to produce a script to automate handling all the rest.

Secondly, I've been tidying up the home fileserver. It was down for some time for various reasons, which means that I've ended up with a new archive of photos, music, and PDFs forming on my laptop. I pulled our music collection out of the backups onto my laptop, too, which meant that I then had a diverging fork of that (as there was some new music on the file server since the last backup, which I later retrieved from the disks), so the re-unification of all those tens of gigabytes of files has been fiddly. But, it's now largely done, which is great; and there's now precisely one master copy of everything, and the home wiki is back up to date and pruned of outdated TODO items from several years ago.

However, this has increased my desire to implement Ugarit's archival mode. Rather than manually curating directory structures to organise my stuff (and the pain of merging changes to them), I'd love to just be able to pour files into a Ugarit library and tag them with metadata (maybe some time after the original import, if I'm in a hurry at the time), then create virtual filesystem views on that which reflect things like "All my music, organised by artist/album/title" or "All my photos, organised by who is in them, year, then event title". Combine that with the proposed Ugarit replication backend, and it will even manage replicas on my laptop as well as the home fileserver, all kept seamlessly in sync; having a home fileserver was easy when I worked from home on a desktop machine so I could just permanently mount the filesystem from the server, but it's a bit trickier with a modern laptop-based lifestyle.

Also, as the archive is already backed up into Ugarit, migrating it into a Ugarit "library" will be fast and efficient - Ugarit will automatically recognise that it already has the content of the files, and just need to upload the metadata!

I think with that and my workshop sorted out, I'm done with spring cleaning - my urgent tasks are now sorting out paperwork for my Cub pack, fixing an offline external disk on my fileserver, getting Ethernet to the workshop so I can do useful computer work in there (and move the home fileserver out of poking range of the baby, who loves to turn it off), resurrecting my salmonella install, hacking Ugarit, ring casting, and getting the foundry working so I can cast bronze, and wearable computer work! Not to mention endless minor DIY things in the house - we've got pictures to put up, dents in the plasterboard walls to fill, a flu to install for the fire, walls to repaint, ...

Not The Oxford Literary Festival 2012 (by sarah)

On March 30th I headed to Oxford to read some of my up coming collection Political Converse. Earlier that day I died my hair what was supposed to be purple - it came out not but that didn't matter. I had a weekend then week then month of readings and workshops, it was time to get rid of the four inch roots plus I was nervous and this sort of thing helps me cope and actually go and perform.

Then there was the issue that due to scare mongering there was no fuel to be had so we had which set up a panic but was quickly solved and we were on our way.

We arrived in plenty of time and then spent an hour trying to find somewhere to park - we didn't use the park and ride as our experience with it have not been good and as I'm still struggling with walking we need to be somewhere relatively near the event.

But we arrived in time to catch the end of an interesting session on self publishing and small indie presses. Including a talk from Dennis Hamley who I remembered from my school days! Though this didn't stop me saying that if he ever met my dad and drink was involved - they would never stop discussing the war (as in WWII).

We then had some fantastic music.

And no I don't remember anyones names 🙁 And that goes for the poets too!

This guy had been involved in the UnCut protests and got himself arrested for being in a shop and reading poetry which is menacing behaviour - if I understood it correctly.

This guy is an ex-solider and has PTSD - his poetry was powerful and I also found out that Westminster is trying to make it illegal to help the homeless to get rid of the problem before the Olympics which makes me sick. I shall be looking into that one a bit more - the guy is involved with various charities.

Dan Holloway the organiser and runner of Eight Cuts Gallery.

I'd bought a posse:

And then sang my Shit Creek I was very nervous and struggled to get my voice out - Alaric said it was just quiet at the beginning but I still did it 🙂 I then read my poetry.

More Poets:

The whole thing was run in the loveliest book shop in the world (that I have found so far). The Albion Beatnik in Oxford - it is almost what me and Alaric wanted to ran our Salaric Emporium (books, gifts, tea, think), back in my uni days.

The night ended on a high with much laughter and deep thought. People left to put poetry to the public - stringing it on fences and what nots. We left to grab a veggie kebab and drive back to Gloucestershire.

p.s. my set was similar but not the same as I read at the Art Tournament No Hoax on the Sunday which Alaric videoed.

Sound quality is naff sorry about that!

The Five Commandments of Sarah (by sarah)

My five commandments (in response to the author Anne Rice's question on Facebook)

1. Love all including yourself
2. cause the least possible harm
3. think for yourself
4. listen to others but make up your own mind
5. Do not be wasteful

What I found interesting was that many people just rehashed the biblical code with no thought as to the base concepts. I do not like the 10 commandments mainly due to them reguarding me as possession of my husband/family. But there was some under laying concepts there thickly overlain by the culture of the time. My 5 have no divine providence they are just the result of me thinking how I would like to live my life and how I think others should too.

The fifth is really part of the second in the same way that making up your own mind is thinking for yourself. Taking responsibility for your own actions I could have slipped in there but erroniously felt it was part of the thinking for yourself - though in hindsight it would make a good fifth.