E-Scribe

This is amateur science at its best. Peter Klausler, an aficionado of the Dvorak keyboard layout, decided to see if there were better permutations of keys yet unrealized:

…I constructed a complicated function that measures the amount of “work” needed to touch-type a given text with a given layout.

Very good. But where does the primordial soup of keyboard layouts come from?

…4096 keyboard layouts compete with each other. The layouts in the initial pool are entirely random. In each generation, they all race to “type” a word list, and their per-word times are multiplied by the word frequencies in the input sample. After the race, the fastest half are kept. The pool is then repopulated by generating a single mutation for each survivor.

So I think what happened is, this post by Jeremy on how Web 2.0 companies need to scale led to this post by Om on how right-on that is which led to this post by David on how you should just chill out.

Trying to reconcile these viewpoints I’m left with the feeling that there’s an incommensurability problem here. They’re using lots of the same words, like “scalability,” making it sound as if they’re arguing about the same thing – but I’m not so sure they are. I think they may actually agree much more than they appear to.

Interesting – About.com is moving to WordPress. I also learned from Matt’s blog posting, much to my surprise, that they were using Movable Type before. It feels very significant that the New York Times Company is migrating its $410-million-dollar baby over to an open source content-management platform. The usual open source components further down the stack – Apache, Linux, et al. – don’t have the same implications for feel and functionality that the content management layer does, and therefore this feels like more of a significant endorsement of open source.