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The tomatoes have been trudging along. They didn’t pop up fast, or grow very quick, but they are steadily getting taller and taller. Their neighbor (the squash) is sort of encroaching on their space, but it hasn’t been too much of a problem yet.

I know that I need to prune these things, I’ve heard that the suckers have to go, but I don’t know what is a sucker and what will eventually be a tomato. I need to call my uncle again. Or do some researching.

Anyway, they are coming along nicely as far as I can tell.

As can be seen below, the squash is growing like crazy. It actually started flowering today. I don’t know if it is necessary or not, but I always hear that some plants need pollinators in order to fruit. Well, there are no bees in my room, so just-in-case it IS necessary, I’ve decided to play the roll of pollinator. It should be only a few weeks now before I can eat these bag girls!

These flowers are actually pretty nice looking.

I don’t know if this is really necessary, but I sort of enjoy it!

It is weird, but this stalk split when the plant got heavy and started leaning over the edge of the trough. I thought about killing it before it got too diseased, but I let it go. Nothing has happened so far, and it has been split for a few weeks. Maybe it’ll live?

…since my last hydroponics post. Its funny… when I see it every day I don’t even notice a change, but when I look on here its amazing how much changes.

OK. A lot has gone down since March.

• A coworker of Jenn’s had a hydro lamp lying around, and he must have a heart of gold because he saw fit to let us use it. I don’t have it hanging that well yet (our ceiling is made of solid metal), but I am working on a solution.
• The morning glory started to get a little grabby, so I nixed it.
• The basil are growing like weeds. They smell great, but they grew really tall and started reaching so they tipped over. I need to do a little research (call my uncle) to see what I should do about them.
• The squash is going nuts and starting to crowd out everything else. You can see it is flowering, no signs yet of any fruiting though.
• The radishes are doing well… I should probably go ahead and eat them and plant more.
• None of the lettuce did well. It got really wilty (as if it was getting too much water) and never could quite stand up. I don’t know if it was too hot, too bright, or too moist… but the lettuce vetoed my system.

So thats the gist. A bit of a mess, but everything is doing well for the most part.

Am I the only one that dives for the remote control whenever a “Carlos Mencia” commercial comes on? One sure way to get my TV turned off is making me listen to that hack. I can not stand that guy. I’m right smack in the center of Comedy Central’s target demographic (26, male, college) and I think that Mencia is categorically not funny. His attempts to push the envelope with racial commentary are tired (and stolen). I can stomach the occasional stereotype about “beaners”, but basing a whole show (or worse: career) on the drivel is just not entertaining. I’m not offended, I’m just not entertained.

I realize comedy central needed to replace Dave Chappelle, but someone over there needs to realize that it is time to pull the plug. The year of low-brow humor being “in” is over (thank God). “Blue Collar TV” and reruns of “Larry the Cable Guy” have shriveled up and died, now if only the same fate would befall “Mad TV” and “Carlos Mensteala” the world would be a much happier (funnier) place.

If you want to replace the 1/2 hour slot, just pick random stand up comedians. I’d rather watch an up-and-coming nobody than listen to endless “midget”, “retard”, “gay”, and “racial” botch jobs. Hell I’d be more likely to stay tuned to 1/2 hour of commercials than listen to this guy.

He isn’t edgy. He isn’t original. He isn’t funny. Cancel it.

I recently installed Ubuntu (a user friendly flavor of Linux) an my Acer Aspire 3000. It was my first time installing Linux and it was amazingly easy. Sound, video, and ethernet all just worked. In my opinion the install process was much easier than installing Windows. Also cool is that Ubuntu actually comes as a Live CD which means that you can boot it up and check it out without committing.

The only thing that wasn’t completely automatic was getting the Broadcom wireless card to work. I had to dig around a little on the Ubuntu Forums but eventually I stumbled upon compwiz18’s script (directions here) that worked like a charm. Of note: the light on the front of the laptop that indicates power to the wireless card worked for me without the acerhk driver.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll screw up the install somehow (installing Beryl maybe?)… so this post is really just a note to myself so I can be back up and running ASAP.

I was recently reading a Slashdot article about how we are stuck with the x86 architecture because its been in use for so long. Everyone’s used to it… its what we have. Whatever.

Someone (J.R. Random actually) made a flippant comment that struck me as odd: “The x86 instruction set will be retired in the same year as the QWERTY keyboard layout.” This intrigued me. I had never put much thought into how or why our keyboards are laid out the way they are. I certainly never knew that there were alternative keyboard layouts.

It turns out that the QWERTY keyboard (so named because of the five letters on the top left side of the keyboard) was infact optimized for performance. Just not the sort of performance we would normally be looking for. Apparently the guy who originally designed the QWERTY layout (Christopher Sholes) designed it so that it would actually be hard to type quickly! He did this because he was a typewriter designer, and anything over about 20 words per minute sometimes caused his typewriter to jam. Rather than redesign his typewriter he laid the keys out so that it would be hard to type fast. He did so by spreading the most popular letters as far apart as he could - which slowed most people down enough that jamming wasn’t a problem. Brilliant!

Sholes’ typewriter had some revolutionary features for its time. Long story short, it was so successful that it become an unofficial standard. Government offices started buying them, schools popped up to teach secretaries how to use them, etc. Eventually typewriters evolved enough so that people could learn to actually go fast, and before you know it, everyone was used to this design that was originally intended to make typists type slowly.

40 years down the road August Dvorak saw a movie of someone typing and thought that the finger movements were really inefficient. He made his own keyboard that would allow for faster more efficient movements: the “Dvorak keyboard”. He put all of the vowels on the left side homerow and all the most common consonants in the top or middle row for the right hand.

The Dvorak keyboard is supposedly better in every typing category (more speed, easier to learn, less finger fatigue/injuries) except for one: prevalence. Everyone in the typing world was already learning on QWERTY keyboards. Almost everyone who has been exposed to Dvorak’s keyboard agrees it is superior to QWERTY, the only reason we stick with QWERTY is that it was here first.

Well… I have decided to give a go of switching to Dvorak. Anyone that is currently running XP, Linux or a MAC can just change the settings of their computer so that it is a Dvorak. Windows users can look here to see how.

According to this free speed test I can currently type around 65 wpm on a QWERTY.

I’m going to practice typing DVORAC for a few weeks and go back and try again. The comparison will be slightly skewed as I’ve been typing on a QWERTY for 15 years… but if Dvorak is really superior I shouldn’t have any trouble catching up to my QWERTY skills in just a few weeks.

Note: I got most of the above details regarding the development and popularization of the QWERTY from Jared Diamond’s “The Curse of Qwerty”, which is actually a really good read.

OK. 12 days since my last update and everything is progressing nicely. I started some radishes, lettuce, squash, and tomatoes around 12 March. Everything except the tomatoes have grown enough that I have put them in the system. See Pictures

The red stemmed plants here are radishes. Also growing is chives (look close) and salad bowl lettuce. The lettuce is acting a little wilty… maybe it is getting too much water?

This is the best of my three squashes. You can see the rockwool cube I started it in. It is really leaning toward the window, but I don’t think that will be too much of a problem.

This last picture shows the whole system. There are two squash plants on the window side and one one the other. The real leggy viney looking plants on the non-window side nearest the camera are (I presume) morning glory (which will get killed if/when it starts grabbing anything). You can also see the basil on the window side is doing really well.

I have been trying to think of a good reason to play with the newly released Google Maps API, but I couldn’t motivate myself to sit down and learn it without a project in mind. I actually have some “kind of good” projects that I COULD do, but nothing too neat.

Nothing too neat until my brother called a few days ago and asked if I could do something for him. He works for the Coast Guard on a buoy tender. They have a hundred (or so) channel markers (buoys) that they take care of. Right now they keep the data on them in an Excel “spreadsheet”, which can be rather tedious. He asked for a way to put them on a map and display info on whatever one is clicked. My moment had arrived! His request was screaming for a Google Map implementation.

I took his spreadsheet converted the relevant information into an xml file. Then I made a little Java/HTML page to display the dang thing on a browser. Only hitch I ran into was making the sidebar load properly in Internet Explorer. For whatever reason the Coast Guard won’t let people install Firefox… whatever. What I should have done was make a two column CSS layout. But I didn’t. I’m stubborn. It SHOULD work with tables in an elegant fashion (in both IE and Firefox at the same time). I spent hours fiddling with different “overflow” options, and IE just never worked right (without making it not work in Firefox). As an interim fix, I think I’ll make a drop-down box style page. I’d be happy to hear anyone’s work around on the IE table overflow issue though.

In the mean time… this is what I have so far:

• USCGC’s Buoy Map Thing for Firefox
• USCGC’s Buoy Map Thing for IE
• USCGC’s Buoy Map Thing as a drop down wussy compromise. (actually I think this looks better, but I couldn’t get it how I ORIGINALLY intended)

My friend Gary gave me a good idea for a “friend monitor”. It’d be easy to make a site just like the above that keeps track of people with whom we are cool. I can’t think of any particularly good uses for the thing… would just be neat. Especially if everyone had a personalized icon.

ANYWAY… say what you will about Google mining all of our personal data. They are giving us some fun free functional toys to play with.

UPDATE: 03 April 2007. I was asked if I could make the markers appear as their appropriate color (usually red or blue but some are striped). This was a relatively easy task with the API. I had to add a “color” field to the xml data and draw the funny striped “buoys”. The result is here.

It has only been two days since I pointed out what looked like a rock growing (see previous post). The below picture shows the same two plants after they rifled up at around 2 inches per day. I don’t even have any nutrients in the water tank yet (just tap water). I need to get to it I suppose.

When reading up on how to actually plant plants in the hydroponic system… I couldn’t find anything hard and fast. Many people said that you should start seeds in rockwool, and leave them in a darkish area until they are hearty enough to be tossed in amongst the hydro system.

So I hunted down some rockwool (I actually had to find a hydroponics store… Lowes didn’t have it), and started some plants in there. The whole idea of starting plants in rockwool struck me as silly though - so I decided to try a few just in the pea gravel with the system turned on. Its a little early to declare complete victory, but putting the seeds directly in the operating system (no rockwool) seems to work just fine for all of the larger seeds.