.: Dvorak Update and a meeting with Dr. Joyner 07/07/2004 :.

I had a long meeting with Dr. Joyner about the design for the system today. We were discussing the pros and cons of building onto the BOINC client as opposed to starting from scratch to implement hierarchical clustering of the clients. Obviously they have done a ton of work on their client - and it is a good stock distributed systems client, but in the end the huge learning curve for learning the ins and outs of their implementation necessitates the need for me to begin from scratch. There are too many unknowns when diving into someone else's code, I would run the risk of drowning in it and never accomplishing a thing. It partly came down to the fear that six months from now I would hit a show stopping snag and have nothing to show for the work, while if I roll my own I shouldn't hit any snags caused by differing design methodologies. The decision was tough. There were many arguments for reusing what they have done. The major deciding factor in the end was the fact that the majority of the BOINC client code is written in C despite the web page making claims to the use of C++... which they do use, but only in the GUI code sections that I wouldn't dream of touching at this phase. So that's that. After thinking this over for the last week I continued forward with my own implementation.

Dvorak Update

I'm still learning how to type on the Dvorak. I would love to say that I'm back up to speed and that it went smoothly, but I can't. It's a battle. My proficiency comes and goes with the breeze. I have brief moments where the typing is smooth and fast, but for the most part I'm still adjusting to the new layout. Most of the mistakes I make now are on non-home-row keys or on keys that shifted hands (i.e. where it was on the left hand side in QWERTY and on the right hand side on Dvorak - or vise versa). The punctuation situation is improving, as well as some of the most common key combinations. I up to around 37 w.p.m. without errors when touch typing, but remain significantly slower when I'm thinking about content and typing. I can say that my wrists hurt less now, a very nice improvement as I was starting to develop carpal tunnel syndrome using QWERTY. The mouse still causes some minor irritations.