joeldg - navigating the surface

above: my keyboard design that I threw together to show what kind of keyboards could be done in touch screens. here is the original image I made before I crammed it into the image with the macbook.

Scenario: You spill beer on a keyboard.
Scenario: You wear off the keys to your keyboard.
Scenario: You are sick of shaking out strange things from your keyboard when upside-down.
Scenario: You have keys that stick.

What are all common threads in those? Yes, the low keyboard, nobody really thinks about the keyboard that we all are sitting in front of, many of you now have your fingers poised above the ‘correct’ keys.

Next time you are in a restaurant or a bar that was established in the last five years, notice something about the systems the people there use, they are all touch-screen. Bar-none, you will NOT find someone punching actual buttons.. They break.

I propose something and actually it is a DREAM of mine, and this something is what I see all around me. Laptops DO NOT NEED ACTUAL KEYBOARDS. And, I mean laptops, not desktops. We don’t need them, and they are the ‘laptop trackballs’ that made a brief, yet abortive appearance a while back, why did we get rid of laptop trackballs? Because like a normal trackball they require maintenance, AND they break. And so do keyboards, if you have not noticed.

I will come out and say it, I HATE KEYBOARDS. The usb one I have now has had most it’s keys worn off and it is one year old, and I have seen that a full pint of beer fits in an iMac keyboard, I have two cats, and right now I know I am typing against a sheet of cat hair inside my keyboard most likely and, in my three laptops while my synaptic pad is great, those buttons are getting stuck and worthless. Let me repeat, I HATE KEYBOARDS, they are filthy and gross and invite a lot of junk to build up, I never like using another persons keyboard and right now I am pissed about my ‘c’ key which is misbehaving on a laptop that is a little more than a year old and I have to press it harder than the others..

Inventors, this is your mousetrap to reinvent, and while I am irritated someone might.

Look at the following ideas, and LOOK at the links, or nothing I say will make any sense, I am thinking of like a 17-inch collapsible iphone, keep that in mind with my comments below:

This one is nice (link)
This one is half-way there (link) but still is thinking “keyboard” which is wrong wrong wrong.
Here is another (link), and the same problem arises, why do you keeping thinking it has to be a keyboard? Do you not own a laptop, get with the times?

Getting closer (link) , but still not really the idea..

These guys (link) are about the closest I have seen.. But, they need to be able to have the INSIDE edge push together to have less of a gap so you can have ONE big screen, and they don’t show the keyboard designs.

Now, while they have great ideas, I think that a perfect laptop for me ‘right now and moving forwards’ would be one that has:
a) dual touch screen, really… the whole damn thing, why waste all that real estate around the keys.
b) a way for me to set up my games to have touch screen, or even automatic in game installation in the “keyboard area”
c) I want it to be spill-proof, which means, no buttons… *maybe* a power button… or just have it turn on when open and skip that one *ewww* mechanical *done ewww* button..
d) I want the keyboard space to BE video/screen space when I fold it down flat and the whole thing is open.. I want that real estate.
e) I want this dead space on my keyboard to hold my calendar my clock, or whatever widget I want. I don’t want it in my work space… who had that dumb-ass idea, it is an aside to have a clock or a calendar next to your document or your code, slap it down in the generally unused space and give us our screen realestate back…
f) I want to be able to flip my laptop around/over and use the ’screen’ as the keyboard, and so on and so forth, this would be handy in a coffee shop or while doing a presentation to not have to ‘turn’ the whole thing, just tilt it over…
g) With the above, I want to be able to put the two halves of my laptop together and turn a 17″ screen with 12.67″ x 11.33″ into double the screen and have a full movie event if I want… and then, have slide-up menu’s for keyboards and controls and have it switch back to the down-side keyboard mode if I pull it back apart. (think about that)
h) I am a programmer and am not addicted to “key-feel” like others, and touchscreen is fine for a keyboard, as long as I can ‘rest’ my hands, fix that shit.
i) I want to have my OWN keyboard layouts (and I am working on some now in my little graphics program to show you what I mean) and if someone is arabic who is with me, I want to see the touchscreen switch on command to their language when I choose it. It has been FAR too long I have been stuck with layouts from people who think one way is ‘the way’ and won’t let me have my own layout ( i.e. I like ergo, but would like the keys further apart and split much further than any keyboard now, for me.. ALL the way to the right and left and leave the middle for something else, also I want my ‘F’ keys on the left side.. NOT on the top, with a modifiable layout I could easily accomplish this, but with a hardware board, and this crap that I am stuck with on my laptops I have NO choice, and it sucks, someone seriously I want to actually redo my keyboard FOR ME)..

These are not little ideas, these are big ideas, but I think that right now the only company that MIGHT get-it is apple, so… If you are listening apple, make my damn laptop and I will be first in-line to buy it and it would be the first apple product I have ever purchased, besides, you guys might make it even better that I dream about.. Until then, I will continue my NO on mac, because to me, you are worse than microsoft, you don’t just control the software you control the hardware as well (and charge *way* too much for that shit, look at the HP site, they have 4GB solid state tablet PC’s with max EVERYTHING for less than $1700.. Apple has NO touchscreen or true tablet PC as of this writing)

Now, that is my dream, and my ideas… Someone make it happen please?

That is a quote from a real person in Tennessee. Don’t believe me, read it here (link).

I have a point of not getting political here, this is not a preaching ground for politics and this is not a place I want to be political, however, I read this article a couple days ago and that quote haunted me. It haunted me because I cannot believe that a person living in the US today could actually utter that, it is a pinnacle of ignorance and miseducation and a complete display of our ugly side, bared for the world to see. We fought against apartheid in south africa, we support the government there, we are on a world stage and we have people who say things like this?

To make matters even worse, we now have a Republican candidate and his tinkerbell trying to claim that an association with a person on a charity is grounds for questioning a persons integrity? This is almost surreal?

Then, CNN displays pictures of “Vote right, vote white” signs.. And interviews people who somehow think that Obama is a terririst, and that he is a muslim, and that Ayers matters in some way to politics today, is astounding. Do I do a background check on every person I sit on a bus with? NO, and would I if I was in a charity organization? NO, HELL NO.. Charity assumes that you are dealing with responsible people, those who care and who want to help a problem you are wanting to help. In light of the (DOW) economy going in the toilet and all our savings in 401k’s (we all got those statements this week showing that our retirement is gone.. we will work until we are 90), McCain seems desperate and sad. If you like voting for sad, fearful and desperate to hang on to remnants of power then.. I think you have your man, but for the rest of free-thinking society I think YOU have your stable man.

To be honest, I am registered non-partisan. I believe in guns, abortion, capital punishment and gay marriage, I think we are a socialist democratic republic and I like that.. I don’t fit in either of those ‘camps’ of blues and reds, I am a little more gray I think, however, the Republicans have been mostly dominated by radical religious view in the last 16 years and I can have none of that. We look at Afghanistan with disdain because they allow leaders of religion to rule them, all the while, they look at us with disdain because we allow leaders of *gasp* one of our religions to lead us. What is the difference? That is what I want to know, separation of church and state, we mandated that for a VERY GOOD REASON in our constitution, it always causes problems in the long run, even for the people who believe in it.

Why are the republicans so mad that they are filled with hate and racism … (see this and tell me they are not filled with hate (link), and have been listening to Rush) they are mad because they know it is over.. Here is a little know fact, as of 2004 there are 72 million registered Democrats in the US, at the same time there were 55 million registered republicans (here is my source (link)) , do your math, we have had a smaller percentage of radical and non-mainstream people running this country for a while, for a country that has prided itself of rule of the majority we have sadly screwed ourselves in favor of a minority group that has aspirations to end the world to bring about end-times prophesy (ala Palin who is a member of the church I grew up in, the Assembly of God, otherwise known as the pentecostal faith)

These are dangerous people, I know, I was raised that way.. They are bigoted and extremist and harmful to society as a whole in every way. I could never in good faith vote for one, not knowing the damage they would inflict to bring about the end times they believe so strongly in.

Read the article I first link in this article before you respond…
If you agree with them.. then vote McCain..
I was seriously considering him before all this hate came out.. I am glad I could see what is really going on.

An angry non-partisan who wishes the GOP was actually what the GOP originally was, not this weird religious organization it has become. The GOP is based on what, NOT christian ‘values’ however those are randomly assigned? No it is based on “Less government” (or at least small government and ‘personal’ responsibility) or.. uhh wait, what does that mean? Oh yea, McCain want to buy your mortgage… (in other words, a bailout of banks by the government is okay, but a bailout of the people is called socialism) The real deal is that “deregulation” (or in other words, less regulation, or in even plainer terms: no regulating bodies, or in just stupid terms “less government involvement” caused this whole mess.. And what is it that the GOP rallies behind? err.. wait.. now that the economy is down, lets not talk about that, Ayers and ACORN should be the topics because as usual we must distract from the real issue of what caused this problem… Lets pin it on Obama, he is black and of course, nobody in america can possibly vote for “that one”

Disgusting republicans..
You have betrayed your roots and made yourselves into caricatures of hatred and bigotry.. I am ashamed for and of you…

First) I moved to Boston, it was not a choice against NY it was a choice for Boston and I am glad I did, I have found a great new place to work and I will be starting with them later this month. The only bad, I cannot find a Chase ATM anywhere here, and they have no branches, I have been relegated to opening an account with BofA which is not making me happy as they are one of ‘those’ banks.

Second) I originally came here working remotely, yes I thought that it was not fun this time and chose to switch to full time employ here in Boston (for more money than I was making at my ‘relaxing job in NY’ as well) ..

Now on to other things, I would like to talk a bit about CEP (Complex Event Processing) and it’s relationship to what developers and engineers do.

Basically, CEP is a query that runs continually on an sql server (that is very general I know) and that server has several inputs which continually input data… Okay, we got that. Now, many of you know about stored procedures and triggers in modern databases, these are replicates of this idea that are ’selfishly’ based. CEP is one of these new buzzwords and ideas, and to think “oh, that is it” is folly, there are people charging over $10k/month for this (I am serious).. The entire point is that you have streams which feed into a database, the continual query has a ruleset that it follows and your business logic is implemented in real time. Okay, cool.. BUT has the world forgot about TRIGGERS in databases, and stored procedures? I realize that this is designed to circumvent DB programmers who have been doing what they do for a long time, but hey…

Following that I don’t want any comments about how I rail against {x paradigm), I love you guys, but just read on..

I suspect that mysql will implement their own version shortly instead of using sqlstream.com (which is linked off the mysql site) and postgres has telegraphCQ (google it) and so on and so forth.. These guys need to get on the ball and explain to business that they have had this ability for a long time and display they are in fact the DB companies we trust and not trying to hamper some new technology that people are charging insane amounts per month for, the same things they could easily program in triggers and stored procs..

CEP is simple, continual queries, and rulesets to work on those queries.. so, if you have stock data on an input and it is flowing in, along with other stock data, you can set a rule saying “if stock A is below 85 and stock B is above 34 then buy stock A” … (that is a very simplified example), but these are not neural networks tied in with GA folks, these are “business rules” programs.. and if you know ANYTHING about modern databases and triggers and stored procedures then you are already doing this stuff…

I spent a good deal of my day today reading and researching what these things do and have concluded they are NOT good for true expert systems, but they are good for many others and are quick to build and deploy, but if you are building an expert system you will be better served to write your own rule set inside the database that stores your data, they all support them now.

The only position I could find myself in using a CEP is with a neural-net committee system as it would be easier to program the CEP to follow rulesets of a committee consensus and fire off programs than to write the logic code, that is it.. And this is ACTUALLY what I am doing with CEP…

However, I keep finding myself thinking that a trigger in mysql would do the same damn thing.

If you have some thoughts on that, please let me know if I am wrong..