wyattanderson.com

Keyboard Elitism

For a while, I used the Apple Bluetooth keyboard I got with my $200 iPhone rebate as my main keyboard. I like Apple's new chiclet keyboards; they're a big improvement over previous Apple keyboard styles and I think they're pretty decent as far as scissor-style keyboards go. Then, this summer, in an effort to reduce my chance of developing an RSI (an effort that seems to be failing, but that's another story), I switched to a Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (or whatever the model is). As far as ergonomics go, it was great, but as a keyboard, it was pretty mediocre. The spacebar sucked, and the keys overall were difficult to press.

So, a couple weeks ago, with some extra disposable income in hand, I picked up a Filco Majestouch mechanical keyswitch keyboard from EliteKeyboards.com, and it arrived today. With what limited time I've spent with it so far, I can safely say that I'll never go back to a membrane-style keyboard again. Here's hoping my future employers are willing to buy me a $150 keyboard. Plus, I mean, it has a red ESC key. How can you not buy one?

This keyboard goes beyond simply being a pleasure to type on; it's incredibly solid and well-built. According to FedEx, it weighs about 4 pounds, which is pretty damn hefty for a keyboard. It also has an incredibly minimalist bezel, unlike the ugly inch of black space around the screen on the iPad, etc. I'll probably weigh in again in a week or two (I think I need a wrist rest in order to be fully comfortable with it), but for now, I'm a convert. I'm officially a keyboard snob, albeit a relatively inexperienced one (see the guys over at GeekHack.org for the definition of “keyboard elitists”).

8 Cores for ~$500

About a year ago, I found a pair of AMD Opteron 8346HE quad-core 1.8GHz CPUs on eBay for about $150. They suffered from AMD's TLB bug with the Barcelona core, but since that bug only seems to affect virtualized workloads, I decided to pick them up anyways. Granted, virtualizing with 8 cores would be nice, but regardless, I couldn't resist such a great price for two quad-core chips. At the time, dual socket F motherboards, ECC RAM, etc. were too expensive to complete the rest of the machine, so I shelved the chips until now.

UR PSC Course Search is Live

For the past year or so, in between other projects at the Political Science department here at UR, I've been working on a new course database to organize the vast number of courses the department offers. Working out the kinks and modeling the database appropriately enough to handle all the edge cases has been a bit of a pain, but I've slowly been putting pages live, and today I launched the entire site, including new functionality that offers "search as you type" functionality. Check it out, it's pretty sweet (in particular, I think my hackish NLU keyword parser does a great job):

New site launch, woo.

Part of my work for the UR PSC Department entails working on and maintaining various other sites, including a site for the Peter D. Watson Center for Conflict and Cooperation. Today, I launched my new design for the Watson Center. It's not very advanced or particularly striking, but I take pride in its simplicity and cleanliness. Check it out after the jump.

Upgrading a MacBook Pro

Having already put a 7200RPM drive in my MacBook which I've now given to my father, I decided to put a 320GB, 7200RPM drive in my new MacBook Pro, along with 4GB of RAM, and it's made a substantial difference (my XBench scores after the upgrade are included).