Tag Archives: personal

Quitting Applications with Dvorak

I wrote earlier that I’ve been training myself on the Dvorak keyboard layout lately, so the fun part is that the Dvorak Q is right where the Qwerty X is and I’m a crazy user of shortcut keys, so there you have it! Can’t wait to make the full switch. By the way, I’m using this plugin to embed tweets.

Learning Dvorak

As some of you might have noticed on Twitter and Facebook, I recently started learning a new keyboard layout called Dvorak Simplified Keyboard Layout, so I decided to share a couple of links that inspired me. The Dvorak Zine uses comics to explain the history and promote the layout. They also have a Dvorak typing course.

Matt Mullenweg’s On the Dvorak Keyboard Layout (written back in 2003) explains the advantages, why and how he switched to the Dvorak layout. Matt also quoted:

I knew that however long it took me to learn it would be incrementally paid for by the increased productivity and comfort in the future.

Quite inspired by all this, I made a 2012 resolution to learn touch typing on Dvorak at least as fast as I can touch type on Qwerty (around 100 words per minute.) I can also touch type the Cyrillic keyboard layout at around 80 words per minute but that won’t change with Dvorak ;)

Interview at WordCast Conversations

After quite a long delay we’ve finally got to launch the interview together with @kymhuynh at WordCast Conversations. Listened to it a couple of times, seems like I said the words “complex” and “complicated” three thousand times, but Kym said it was okay ;)

Kym Huynh talks with Konstantin Kovshenin about his work with robotics and his passion for WordPress, WordPress Plugins, APIs, and the WordPress Community he hopes to ignite in Russia.

We spoke with Kym last year when WordPress 3.0 was sexy with all it’s new features and stuff, so you might feel it a little bit updated. Perhaps I should ask Kym to record a follow-up ;) Anyways, the rest of the interview is all about me, my story, hobbies, what I do and how I write code. Mentioned are Visual Basic, C++ and ASP (who would have thought?). I still have those blog posts on my first .NET MVC project, I would have spoken about it and about Python too. But anyhow, was great being on the show!

So head over here to listen to the episode, then head back and let me know what you think about it. Oh yeah, and don’t forget to retweet this post. Cheers!

Amazon Web Services: Cloud Computing Free of Charge

Howly shmoly, just read the announcement of Amazon’s Free Usage Tier offering an EC2 micro instance free of charge for a whole year! Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Well let’s go back a few months and analyze the reason why I left Amazon in favor of Media Temple’s (ve) service: Amazon is way too expensive for a young geek like me, barely having the money to pay rent for my lousy apartment in Moscow ;)

Well that’s not the only reason, but I’m now quite comfortable with (mt)’s services, except their tech support, but that’s not what this post is about. I must have flooded my Twitter with messages about Django and Python. Honestly, I fell in love with Python a few months ago (in theory) then started scratching code in the beginning of October, but then again, this is not what the post is about (can somebody tell me why I’m going off-topic today?)

Back to AWS. The news is good, but the fact that they mention “new customers” frightens me:

These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details).

I’ve been with them for over a year, paying a bunch of money every month, so I’m not a new customer for them anymore, unfortunately. So they’re not really targeting old customers which were unsatisfied with something, but new ones which have never tried EC2 (S3 and all the rest). Again, this is only a trial, unlike Google AppEngine, which happens to love Python code.

So my thinking is – is this all a coincidence, or is it a light for me towards AppEngine, Python and Google? Stay tuned: @kovshenin :)

October Quickie: A Little Bit of Everything

Well yeah, it started snowing today here in Moscow, but this post is not about snow. I remember I’ve done some quickie before, but couldn’t find it. Perhaps it was something I mentioned inside the blog post with a different title. But anyways, this is a short roundup of what I’ve been up to lately.

Let’s start with Python.. After reading a very popular book called Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran (review coming later), I had no choice but to peek at how Python is doing. I didn’t carry out much of the excercizes in the book while reading it, but I did run a few experiments afterwards. Some of the code examples were translated into PHP to immediately implement into my Twibots project, the juice was left for later.

This weekend I decided to gather some data from the Twitter Streaming API for some experimental purposes, and I decided to do this in Python. Of course I hadn’t had much time to read good books (still waiting from Amazon), but the plenty online tutorials, guides and articles out there are quite okay. So with a little trial and error I managed to write a script which gathers a little over 10,000 tweets in 30 minutes and dumps them into a database. That’s 20,000 tweets an hour, ~ half a million tweets a day. What am I going to do with those? I’ll give you an insight on this project a little bit later ;)

Twitter. I finally got #newtwitter. I thought it was a joke. It’s not a secret that I have multiple Twitter accounts, but I use them for development purposes, and guess what, those accounts were switched to the new Twitter three weeks before my account was. So yeah, I’m a little mad at Twitter, but their new look really rocks. They also need some updates to their mobile version.

.NET MVC. Some of you might be wondering (or not) what happened to that .NET MVC project of mine. Well it’s 99% finished, but we’re constantly coming up with changes to the content part, switching images around and other dirty work. Latest comment from the client was – okay so I open up Safari, click View and check the Zoom Text Only option. Then I zoom in and the whole design breaks! You guys promised me nice-looking XHTML in Opera, Safari, Chrome, IE and Firefox, what the heck?

PHP. I wrote an app in PHP that allows me to turn off my PC from my iPhone. I extended it to include volume up/down features a few days later. These are the kind of apps you write when you’re lazy ;)

And finally some goodies from all around the web for web designers and developers:

That’s it for today. Cheers!