Keyboards, Citrix Webinars, Korea

View 769 Tuesday, April 02, 2013

The weekend was eaten by locusts, and yesterday by the biggest locust of all, getting my taxes done. I’m still at them, too.

And I am still doing silly things so you don’t have to.

Keyboard Dilemmas

For years I hung on to my old Ortek keyboard in large part because it had programmable hot keys, and I could program one key for my name, another for my full address, and others for common messages. I liked that feature enough that I stuck with the Ortek on this “main” machine even though the key layout was square and linear, while everywhere else I have gone over to Microsoft “Comfort Curve” keyboards. Comfort Curve layout must remind my fingers of the Selectric I did my books on before the computer revolution. Or something. But eventually the Ortek died. All the characters wore off the keys so that I was typing on a blank keyboard, and while my fingers know where all the keys are, my mind and eyes don’t.

When the Ortek died I had several Thermaltake keyboards. They are beautiful, and the feel is pretty good, but I can’t type as fast on them as I can on the Comfort Curve. I am really a sloppy typist. I learned on mechanical typewriters, and even when I switched over to electrics and then IBM Selectrics (which were wonderful) I could go on being sloppy because you have to hit a key reasonably hard in order to make it make an impression on the paper. If you hit two keys at once either nothing happens, or the one you hit first works and the other doesn’t, or something like that – anyway my most common typing error is the insertion of extraneous letters into words. For some reason I don’t make that error much on the Comfort Curve keyboards. I do a lot on these Thermaltake beauties. They have a great feel and for those who can use them there’s a certain elegance to them, but I fear they do slow me down a bit.

Thermaltake has software to let you do all kinds of programmable hot key tricks – they are after all primarily a high end games machine outfit – and it would be no great trick to program their “T” keys to do just about all the stuff I was doing with my Ortek, so I have used this Thermaltake for a couple of months to see if my fingers would get used to it, but they don’t, not really. As for example in that last sentence I had to correct njot to not. I suppose I could painstakingly enter in the most common of those mistakes into autocorrect, but I am not sure I have that (mmuch) (miuch) much patience; better, I think, to just go to a Comfort Curve. Which brings me to the question: is there a simple way to program simple phrases into Outlook or Word and tie them to, say, alt-F6 or something like that? You‘d think I’d know, and I may have at one time, but I got so used to doing everything I need that sort of thing for on the old Ortek that I didn’t keep up.

One of the big advantages I’ve had in my life is that I can, at need, tool up to learn almost anything, my favorite example being that I once understood Pendulous Inertial Guidance Systems, and in fact knew more about them than almost anyone because as editor of a USAF technology survey I had the necessary clearances and access and need to know. Of course once I got the report written I promptly forgot the whole mess. I subscribe to the Sherlock Holmes theory of brain storage capacity. The point being that I could tool up and learn all about modern keyboards and macros and programmable hot keys, and perhaps I’ll have to, but perhaps I’ll get some good suggestions with this inquiry? One way or another I’m going to have to change to a keyboard standard, and the Microsoft Comfort Curve keyboards seem to be physically about the best for touch and feel for my sloppy habits. Now I just need some timesaving software.

Conferencing Software Lessons

I’ve been doing TWIT and interview shows with Leo Laporte (http://twit.tv/show/triangulation/90, http://twit.tv/show/triangulation/95) and apparently some of the science fiction fans of Tony Smith’s StarShipSofa web seminar http://www.starshipsofa.com/ asked him to talk Niven and me into doing a show with him. Niven is at present pushing a book he did with Greg Benford, so Greg got sucked in also. Anyway it’s scheduled for April 21 which is comfortably after taxes and other demands, and next thing I knew we had all agreed. So this morning Tony Smith asked if we could test his hookup.

Leo Laporte uses Skype for his conference shows. This is nearly automatic. I fooled about with webcams and my PC system, but I soon found the easy way to do those shows was to turn on Skype on my Mac Book Pro and put on a Plantronics headset. With Mac everything is very simple or else it’s impossible, and this time it proved to be very simple. It’s simple for Leo, too: he uses a different computer for each guest phone call and mixes the signals in a godawful expensive box that no one else can afford, all this in a magnificent new studio. It’s lovely and simple for the participants, but then he’s a professional with paying advertisers.

Tony Smith uses Citrix GoToMeeting software. So this morning I got the link to the conference in an email. The email comes in on my PC. I don’t get email on the Mac Book Pro. No need to. Of course that machine is networked with the PC I go email on, but I didn’t go to that trouble. I just printed the link and pasted it into the paper log book I still keep, and typed that into Safari on the Mac Book Pro. There was a certain amount of trundling, but shortly after I was connected to Northeast England, somewhere just north of Newcastle. I could see Tony fine. I could hear everything although at first the GoToMeeting software thought that it should use the Mac speaker and built in microphone, and it wasn’t at all obvious how to change that to the Plantronic headset, but eventually that was all right.

What wasn’t all right was the video. There wasn’t any video. There wasn’t any little video icon. There was not, in fact, any clue to indicate that Citrix had ever heard of video except that Tony’s picture came in fine and there was a screen full of stuff which I presume was his desktop screen. We looked about for half an hour with no results. Tony was concerned that I am still using Mac OS 10.6.8 and I ought to be using 10.8. I’ll do that after tax time: I intend to update all my Mac stuff including getting the best I can out of my iPhone, but other things have been more pressing lately. Eventually I got an on line Citrix tech in a chat box. He assured me it ought to work just fine with 10.6 and above, checked the conference number and pronounced Tony’s software up to date and fine, and suggested I get technical support for my Mac Book Pro which was clearly defective. Since I use it on Skype I was pretty sure that wasn’t the problem. So much for Citrix on-line tech support.

For grins I then turned the iMac loose on Tony’s conference, so now I was logged into it twice, with two not quite simultaneous voice inputs, one from the Plantronics headset connected to the Pro, and the other the iMac’s microphone. I also heard everything sort of twice. Pretty confusing. Of course there was no video from either one of them. About then they brought Niven in for a test, and he doesn’t have a headset, which produced another set of echoes. However, his PC with a USB external videocam showed perfectly good video of Larry and his study. We decided to solve the sound problem – Larry would get a good headset, and let Eric install it and be sure that with the headset on Larry’s PC’s speaker won’t be on. One problem solved and Larry went off line.

So did I. A few minutes later Tony was back in email with his own expert, Lior Saar: there was a remedy, perhaps; could we try it?

So once again I connected the Mac Book Pro to Tony’s GoToMeeting conference (I think it’s actually Webinar rather than GoTo Meeting even though the address handle is gotomeeting). This took a bit longer. The trick was that Tony has to tell his machine that I am the presenter. He did that. The software told me that I was a presenter and anything on my desktop would now be visible to the world. I said all right to that, and LO! my control panel options changed. Citrix had heard of webcams after all! Did I want to use mine? Gosh yes, I replied, and my face and background appeared instantly. Now we could hear Tony’s friend Lior in as part of the conference, but he was on a Mac, and Citrix by default doesn’t believe that Macs have a camera. Comes now the acid test, designate Lior as a presenter and see if that makes me vanish.

It didn’t. Lior appeared. Now we had three of us on screen, and all appeared to be well. The secret, apparently, is that by default Citrix software searches PC’s for a camera and uses it if it finds one; but it assumes that Macs don’t have one until the webinar organizer tells the software that this Mac guy will be a presenter, at which point the software actually looks to see if there’s a camera. If so, (and after all, all Macs have a videocam) all is well, and it apparently remembers that for the rest of the session.

Earlier today they had tested this setup with Greg Benford. He too has a Mac. And they never got him on video. Greg didn’t have the time to fool around until he got his phiz on the webinar and who can blame him, but I make no doubt it will work now. I will say in favor of Citrix that once it is working the video is very good, I think a bit better than I get with Leo using Skype. So next April 21 head to StarShipSofa http://www.starshipsofa.com/ and watch the three of us blather.

I expect I’ll repeat a lot of this in an upcoming Chaos Manor Reviews which I hope to revive after taxes. And while it was very simple for me to use my Mac on this, it turned out not so simple for Tony using his Citrix software.

Technically South and North Korea are in a state of war, and since North Korea has denounced the armistice that ended the Korean War, they are also in a state of war with the United States. This gives the President expanded war powers

Of course at the beginning of World War II the Japanese government required the Kingdom of Siam otherwise known as Thailand to declare war on the United States. We ignored it. One State official told me the document was deliberately lost. Since we had never officially received it we never ended that war, and remained on friendly terms; we treated Thailand as a neutral throughout the war.

Doubtless it is a bit more complex in this situation. Legally we are at war. That may or may not have a practical effect.

Or perhaps China will intervene? Of course the last time they did, it was by surprise one night at the Chosen Reservoir. China did not want a US ally on their border. They still don’t. The problem is that bringing North Korea into the modern world will require work and investment on the order of the task of bringing East Germany up to date except that East Germany wasn’t nearly as bad off as North Korea is. The only people who can and want to help North Korea are the South Koreans, but as US allies they aren’t acceptable to China. Japan could do it and would profit from the effort but Japan isn’t acceptable to either half of Korea as a permanent presence on the peninsula.

We wanted Russia in the war against Japan. They came into the war five days before Japan surrendered. We have been paying for that ever since. So have the Japanese.

I have once again collected a number of web sites as open tabs in Firefox.  I intended to comment on these but I am running out of time and I have a lot of tabs. Here in no particular order are some places I found interesting.

 

http://www.c3headlines.com/2011/07/sea-levels-higher-during-medieval-warming-period-research-shows-current-sea-level-rise-began-by-1750.html  Yet one more observation on global warming. My view remains this: we know that the Earth has been both warmer and colder than it is now, in historical times, prehistorical  times, and through geological history. We know that civilizations formed when the sea was a lot lower than it is now – the Persian Gulf was marshes not 100 meters of water. We know that the whole world was warmer in Viking times.  And no model we have can take the initial conditions of, say, 1800 and run out to show what happened since.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/evidence-suggests-biblical-great-flood-noahs-time-happened/story?id=17884533#.UVoDxVfp9ts This is different from my daughter’s geographic film on Diving Into Noah’s Flood.  (Well, Jeffrey Rose is the Geographic’s star, but Jenny was the scientist of the show.)

 

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/03/is-kaiser-permanente-a-failing-model-for-us-healthcare/  Informative but not very conclusive. I don’t think Kaiser can be cloned, and I suspect that trying to make it dramatically larger will destroy some of its effectiveness. From my view it is working ver well, and it ain’t broke and don’t need fixing.

 

http://www.writing.uci.edu/news.html  Niven and I will be down there Thursday 4 April.

 

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/03/01/boeing-phantom-eye-completes-2nd-flight/?intcmp=features#ixzz2MJ0IfnOW

 

http://imgur.com/a/dlEAa?gallery  Yuk.