Josh Carter

I have over a decade of professional C++ experience, but I don’t call myself a “C++ Programmer.” Am I competent with programming in C++? Yes, very much so. But I refuse to let my skills be pigeon-holed by the language I’ve historically used. Nor should you.

Use the right tool for the job, the saying goes, and software development is no exception. Programming languages, frameworks, and other tools are the subject of religious-caliber debate but they are just means to a greater end. This article is a call to both programmers and their managers: a good programmer cannot be summed up by the list of tools they use.

JET very kindly unearthed a treasure chest containing the One True ROM Image for DataRover 840s, a PC Card that will flash a 840’s ROM to Magic Cap 3.1.2j. This card can be used to re-flash a ‘rover with no additional hardware. (See also this article for reflashing a ‘rover using the developer tools and serial cable.) You can download the ROM image from the archives page and load it to a 8MB linear flash card yourself, or if you need a pre-flashed card mailed to you, contact me.

Note: if you bought a DataRover on eBay that has pre-release Rosemary firmware (usually dated 9/1/1997), that won’t work with the packages in the archive. It’s best to update to 3.1.2j.

Last night I attended the inaugural meeting of the Boulder-Denver Ruby User’s Group. “Meeting” was a term used in the loose sense–it was more a gaggle of Ruby enthusiasts sitting around tables with beer, chatting about Ruby and other geek stuff. The meeting was held at a brewery, so it was impossible to hear people more than a couple feet away, but as the group shifted around I probably talked with half a dozen others.

I’ve done a heck of a lot of typing over the past ten years, and my keyboards show it. They look grimy and beaten down, but continue to work flawlessly. After doing a rubik’s cube paint job on my first Kinesis keyboard, I decided I’d fix up another, this time applying lessons learned from the first. This article describes to you can create your own New Hotness like mine pictured above.

When I first moved to Silicon Valley I worked crazy hours. I loved my job and I needed to prove myself, so I was coding like crazy. That translates to typing like crazy, and it wasn’t long before that caught up with me. This article covers my ensuing experience with ergonomic keyboards and the Dvorak keyboard layout.

Rewind to 1995. I could type pretty fast on a normal keyboard. My touch typing was not textbook proper, but hey, it worked fine for me. I started getting worried when I would go home and I could still feel the tension in my forearms and wrists. I figured that if I was going to be a programmer geek for any decent amount of time, I’d have to fix those problems pronto.

I got to talking to Eric Townsend, a coworker of mine who owned the wackiest keyboard I had ever seen. It was a Kinesis Contoured keyboard. I found myself fascinated enough to drop the $300 (at the time) to get one myself.