A while ago I wrote about cleaning my keyboard. And later Microsoft announced the new Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000.

It arrived on last Saturday!

First I had to get used to the slightly changed layout compared to the original MS Natural Keyboard (the rows of the keys are not just tilted but curved as well). It's a different feeling writing on it, but it's nice and from work I used to different keyboards anyway (“normals” ones, not so small ones for 19" racks, really small ones for racks and laptop keyboards).

There're almost only nice things from me to tell. First the “feared” new F key remembers it's state! The keyboard does it itself (it's remembered on switch on; maybe the keyboard will forget its state if the computer is switched off for a longer time). The wrist support, which was a bit small on the original Natural Keyboard, is much larger now. It could just be a little bit wider on th e right. I'm just not sure if the material is a clever joice. It's nice to the touch in the beginning, but if you start to sweat it's not better than normal plastic, and I'm not sure if this isn't the weakest part of the keyboard.

The layout is a classical one, but the rigtht “start” button removed, which is clever because the keys would be too small otherwise. There are some additional keys on this board. Not as many as on other ones and to be honest: I wouldn't need them. Some even yield keycodes on Linux, so I can even use some. Actually I'd like to use the back/forward buttons and maybe the zoom slider. It's just not urgent enough, to look for a solution. I just can't understand, that the additional “"”, “(”, “)” yield the standard keycodes, so that they could be used out of the box. At least the backspace there does.

What I like as well is the reversed slope of the keyboard (you don't have to use this, but test it, it is very nice if you get used to it). AFAIR only the original Natural Keyboard had this option and all the successors didn't have this. Actually the new implementation of the stand looks nice, but the integration was better for the original one.

After unpacking this keyboard I was a bit astonished that no USB to PS/2 converter was included. But plugging it into my pc all worked from the beginning! Access to the BIOS, to GRUB and to Linux without having to configure anything. If this will work for the mouse as well (I use a Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 2.0 and for this they recommend to use the USB to PS/2 converter if a port on the pc is available) without any trouble, it is really justified to use the same plug for these devices. I don't like the current solution to use a PS/2 plug for mouse and keyboard as long as you have to plug the device in a specific port! So no problem there, at least on my computer.

Looking bottom side of the keyboard I see even screws and no clamps, so I can hope that this keyboard will be opened easily for cleaning…

My old one (the original Microsoft Natural Keyboard) moved to my desktop at work. I expect that it will still last a bit.

Yes, I like Microsoft's hardware, sometimes…

I'm thinking about commenting on the election still, but there're so many articles out there regarding the actual outcome, that this will have to wait. Actually all the trouble isn't over until the one constituency here in Dresden (no, I'm living in another one and did vote last Sunday) and a chancellor will be elected…

What I'm much more confused about is the discussion about changing the voting system. Here in Germany we have a pretty complex conglomerate of a majority voting system and a proportional representation. Both systems have their (dis-)advantages. Switching to a majority voting system alone will definetly stop fragmentation of the parliament effectively. In the new parliament there would be to big factions (CDU/CSU and SPD) and then there would be about two of PDS and one of the Greens—voila, no problems any longer…

But consider Germany today without the Greens in parliament! Or even FDP (I think esp. in jurisdication FDP set quite some marks, even if not so many in their late years).

On the other hand just using a proportional system isn't the best thing as well. Because then there's no chance to get politicians into the parliament without being supported by a party. Esp. if it's an exclusive proportional system, chances are good that contrarians in one party wouldn't get much chances. In a majority system a well-known and popular contrarian may get a chance if he has a high chance to win his constituency.

So the combination of both system is basically very good, but the system used in Germany is very complex and not always just (some time ago there were some articles about this in Spektrum der Wisssenschaft the German edition of Scientific American). The system is so complex, that the by-election in the one constituency in Dresden may lead to a shift of up to three seats in parliament (then there'd be a real stand-off of SPD and CDU). It's paradoxical: for this to happen, CDU has to win this constituency and will loose one seat by this in parliament…

I think the new constitution of the parliament shows the spirit in Germany quite well: there's no majority for the politics of CDU and FDP. That doesn't necessarily mean that Germans don't want reforms, but they don't want to follow the ways demonstrated by CDU and FDP.

Electing again soon would be a shame as well. The politicians couldn't warrant a more pleasent (for them) result anyway…

Just installed firefox 1.5 beta 1 as there're RPMs for Suse 9.3 available.

Works so far, I just miss the Gnome theme and the searching for extensions updates didn't work completely. Looking on the homepages revealed much more working ones. As Firefox 1.5 is beta still, it's no problem to use beta versions of extensions as well. ;-)

An entry in kju's blog shows a method to use a PHP contact form to send spam, if you just accept any entries without checking. Esp. vulnerable to this is the From field. There it's pretty easy to add aditional CCs and all this can easily be used by bots.

I didn't experience any problem yet and as all contact form mail is sent to me (and I don't think you can stop this easily, as the To field is hardcoded), I should definetly see such mails. But nevertheless I changed the PHP code for sending the contact form.

Now I just have to look for this tomorrow at work as well (and I have to check if some of the spam I get at work comes using the contact form of the company's homepage).

Until now I used the NP_LatestPosts. In a forum discussion how to get such a list, ketsugi posted a much more elegant solution without using any plugin at all but just standard features. I must admit, that at first I didn't understand how he'd wanted to get such a list just using the blog command, but later he explained in more detail:

For instance, my plain/recent template looks like this:
Item body: <li><a href="<%FancierURL%>" title="<%title%>"><%title%></a></li>
Skin (sidebar.inc): <h1>Recent Posts</h1>
<ul class="submenu">
<%blog(plain/recent,10)%>
</ul>
And that's it. So you can see that calling this template will display my most recent blog posts as links in a list. And of course you can customise the template to show as much or as little information as you want.

That means now I have one plugin less to look after… Thanks for this nice tip. ;-)

On Cosmic Variances is a nice discussion about the badscience article: Don't dumb me down.

Actually I don't like many of the science journalism out there—at least these which are trying to dumb me down. There are many journals and TV sessions just for that. Here in Germany most (or all?) of the private TV stations have some formats where they try to sell scientific sensations. As they just show sensations, you can get many things wrong if you don't know nothing about it.

But why is it? Because journalists are not interested in “real” scientific results but just in sensations?

Well, I think yes, but not because they're not interested personally, but because they have to sell their product and actually I think many people are just interested in the sensation and not in the scientific facts. And I have experienced, that many people just expect not to understand scientific facts regardless how they are presented (so they stick to sensations). It's all about market and to abandon this practise is pretty hard. I do agree, that a bit more scientific facts (nicely written) would help and that we all need this.

But isn't this a problem for all journalism? You always have to pick the sources you'll like. And honestly, for scientific news and articles you have at least a chance to get some well written articles not dumbing you down!

Badscience is a very interesting blog; BTW these texts are published in an Guardien column.

You're looking for an ergonomic keyboard? Here's a gallery with many devices, some maybe just as “historical” information, but many with unusual designs.

BTW, Microsoft just announced the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 some days ago. As this has a correct layout after all the crippled ones before (but the original Natural Keyboard), this will replace my old Natural Keyboard (maybe I'll use the old one at work then).

Last week I've seen Sin City in a cinema using digital projection.

Actually I was stunned by the qualitiy. I didn't expect it to be that good—really superior to an analog projection. Sin City may not be the perfect film because of its style, but the digital trailer was just amazing. The ads were projected using analog so you could compare it almost directly (ok, the ads rolls are always pretty old and low quality). When the digital projection started showing a panorama of some high mountains (maybe alps), I was overwhelmed (BTW the screen size was about 150 m²).

Today I talked with a friend about it and he told me, that current projectors have an resolution of about 2 MP!

I wase stunned again: just that low? I looked a bit around in the net. Unfortunately they don't tell it on the homepage of the cinema in question, but all the other documents I found imply, that the current resolution is about 2 MP (2 K vertical lines). So what can we expect, if the proposed higher resolutions come to the cinema? First 4K and then even 8K…

Now I just want to watch a movie with some real scenery there…

Terratec announced the noxon2audio!

What's changed

• It really does 802.11g with 54 MBit/s (that's never needed for streams it can play anyway) and what's more important it supports WPA now (WPA2?).
• It has some new inputs: LAN besides WLAN and USB for playing from portable disks e.g.
• It has some new outputs: TOS link (!) and headphones.
• It has some buttons now. So maybe you can even switch it off? Anyway it's nice to be able to stop playing without remote control.
• It looks better on the images, but will it in reality as well? The images on the web page do rather look like being rendered…

What's (unfortunately) not changed

• Still the same blue lighted display. One question to Terratec: you didn't read any of the critics by users on the net, didn't you? If you'd have, you'd have noticed that the blue lighted displays is one of the major negative points about this device, if it is not even the major flaw.
• It still can't play RealAudio and OGG. You should really change that. This shouldn't be too complicated.

What to expect

Terratec still supports playing stream directly without using a UPnP server. That's really good, there're not so many devices out there being capable of this.

There's already a firmware update scheduled, which will bring playback of mms. But was there any update for the Noxon firmware yet? So I may doubt this.

As this gadget looks pretty similar (looking at the spec) could you release a firmware update for the original Noxon with the new features (WPA, mms)? And add OGG and RealAudio on the way?

Or won't you, because you want us to buy the Noxon2…