War is God's way of teaching Americans about geography. -- Ambrose Bierce

Almost two years ago I read about some text input software in the Economist that really interested me. It allows quick and easy typing using only one hand, using a mouse, stylus, or some other non-keyboard input device. It works by providing all the letters and some puncuation on the left hand side of the screen in a vertical column, where any one can be selected. After one character has been selected the sizes of each letter changes based on the probability that it will be selected next. Probabilities are calculated by doing a statistical analysis of all words in the english language (and maybe even by guessing which words will follow the previously entered words). For instance if a 'S' is selected first, the next letter will probably be a vowel, an R or a T, and probaly not a Q or B. Thus, the vowels, R, T will be bigger, and easier to select after an S, and Q and B will be small. This makes selecting one of the likely letters easier, and makes text entry faster.

I forgot what the software was called, but my girlfriend Evelyne was interested in it since she's studying occupational therapy, and this software is great for people who can't operate a keyboard. Finally I found the name of the software again. It's called Dasher. You can see more details here: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/.

I just read something really interesting in Social Studies:

U.S. researchers have explored the astonishing lack of attention we pay to our surroundings, writes Roger Highfield in The Daily Telegraph. "In one experiment, people who were walking across a college campus were asked by a stranger for directions. During the resulting chat, two men carrying a wooden door passed between the stranger and the subjects.

"After the door went by, the subjects were asked if they had noticed anything change. Half of those tested failed to notice that, as the door passed by, the stranger had been substituted with a man who was of different height, of different build and who sounded different. He was also wearing different clothes."

So, I want to be a nerd, and I figure that means having something overly technical in my blog. So here goes: I compiled and installed PostgreSQL at work today. Mostly it went smoothly, but there were a few bumps. Here are the steps:

1. Download the latest and greatest PostgreSQL from their site (7.4.2).
   
2. Untar and do a ./configure. Uh-oh, it's complaining I don't have GNU Readline.
   
3. Download GNU Readline 4.3 from here.
   
4. ./configure;make. This won't compile. Its complaining that -r and -shared can't be used together with ld. After some quick googling I find the problem is that while I'm using the GNU compiler and linker, on Solaris (where I'm building this) there's a problem using the GNU linker. So, I moved /usr/local/bin/ld to a temp location and linked /usr/ccs/bin/ld in there, and compiled again. Success. A quick make install and GNU Readline is installed.
   
5. Back to Postgre. ./configure, works this time. Now gmake, gmake install, and the database is installed.
   
6. A few more steps from the INSTALL file create the postgre user, create the data directory, do a quick test and everything is working.
   

At this point I learned a few things, like PostgreSQL is case sensitive when it comes to reserved words. So 'select * from account;' doesn't work , but 'SELECT * FROM account;' does. Weird.

Next, I wrote a quick Java app to test JDBC functionality. I downloaded the JDBC3 driver from here and tried to connect, but couldn't create a socket. Telneting to the server on port 5432 failed too. The server wasn't listening. A bit more googling and some playing around and I learn that I have to enable TCP/IP listening in /usr/local/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf, but uncommenting tcpip_socket, setting it to 'true' and uncommenting the 'port' line. I restart the server, try the Java app and it works! Nice. The only problem now is that my user doesn't have rights to do anything through JDBC. A quick 'GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON account TO user' and everything works.

So, that was my day. Feeling quite proud of my geekiness right now.

So this is my new blog. Now that I have your attention, I think that everyone should go to: http://www.menwholooklikekennyrogers.com.