For those who are having difficulty coping with unzipping help is on the way. Mark Keates, my computer programmer, is putting up a new version in the next day or two, which should work easily on all computers.
Over in Florida Dr Jose Sifontes has invented a method for turning municipal waste and horse manure into gas in just three weeks. Sifontes used to work for Mobil. But a few years ago (inspired perhaps by his theology degree) he decided to strike out on his own. He used his own money to do research and now he reckons he has got the thing working.
The full story is in a new blog The Fuelling Station (link under Work in the panel to the right of this one) which is on the Tampa Bay site associated with the St Petersburg Times. It is written by an ex-student of mine in the 1980s, David Adams.
Not only was he a good reporter and journalist but he took the trouble to learn the basic skil of touch typing which he found a bit difficult. Countless times as I left the office about seven I would find him alone in a room tapping away on an ancient Imperial typewriter.
That was long before the days of typingbytouch. He was using an ingenious invention by Robert Flanders. Flanders had worked for National Coal Board for most of his life but in the 1970s ended up managing something or other at The Financial Times, where the editor was having great difficulty in getting the Oxbridge graduate trainees to learn to type.
One night, lying in his bath, Flanders had an inspiration. A looseleaf pad with a typing exercise printed out double spaced. You tore off the sheet, inserted it into the typewriter, and typed the words in the space below. The Financial Times thought they should own this invention. So Flanders resigned, went back home to Lewisham and developed it there. He wrote the boy’s adventure story Tom’s Tale, which is part of typingbytouch. He patented the pad idea and made enough money to pay the mortgage for a few years.
But then the computers took over. And you cannot patent an idea. Though the same concept is used in most computer typing tutorials Bob had to find another way to earn his living. He generously told me I could use Toms Tale in my Writers Keyboard Tutor for free. I last heard from him a few years ago when he was using that program to teach dyslexics. His researches into the psychology of learning difficulties led him to believe that learning to type helped dyslexic’s to overcome their disability.
Bob was the sort of chap who was always more interested in solving interesting problems than making pots of money. Dr Sifontes sounds a man of the same ilk.
And all because of computers.
Yesterday my eldest daughter could not get her home email to work. Which is bad enough for anyone, but when you are trying to rear two kids, do a part-time job and a part-time MA, it is enough to send you round the bend. So I went round there today just after breakfast expecting to fix it in an hour. In fact I was there until nearly 5 PM.
There were, as so often, a number of problems. Not only was her email not working but it was impossible to get into the web at all. I spent some hours messing with the settings but nothing worked until I went in to the other room, and disconnected the Blueyonder box, left it off for a few minutes. And then turned it back on again.
It worked. But like a snail. I could have written a short page in the time it took to for the Blueyonder home page to load. But it was working so I decided to download the free software Firefox from the Mozilla site. And I was then able to reconfigure Holly’s email so that it worked both ways.
Except that I then found that her partner’s email would not work. I managed to get his working again but found that all his old emails, including a few he had not read, had disappeared.
I shall have to go there after breakfast tomorrow to try and find them. But if it does not take the whole day I shall do another posting tomorrow about why computers cause so much trouble, even to people who have spent quite a lot of time seeking to understand how they work.
QWERTY is 138 years old this year. It was invented by Christopher Scholes in 1868 to solve the then major problem preventing people from typing at speed. If adjacent keys were typed in rapid succession the keys stuck together in mid-air so that the typist had to stop and untangle the keys.
Thanks to the power of Remington, which bought the patent from Scholes and marketed it QWERTY has dominated the world of typewriting ever since. That dominance has continued into the computer age so that all computer keyboards for English and European languages are engraved with the QWERTY layout.
Touch typing was not invented until eight years after QWERTY. But the men at Remington did not have to learn it. They had scores of women, who went off on a one-year course to learn QWERTY and to translate the dictated words, or the handwriting, of their bosses into typescript.
Today the vast majority of the millions who use computers do not have secretaries to input their words. And most of them manage with two or three fingers but they don’t know how quickly and easily they could learn to touch type.
What they do not know is that a far better keyboard layout was invented by August Dvorak in 1934 and that this layout is available on their computers in all the leading operating systems, such as Windows, Applemac , Linux and Unix. Find out how to use it by going to my typingbytouch site.
The minority who have heard of Dvorak are deterred from making the change because the computers they have to use do not have the Dvorak layout printed on the keyboard. Although once you have learnt to touch type this does not matter because your fingers have learnt to find the correct keys by touch, it is a substantial deterrent in the learning period.
Since Dvorak can be learnt in one third of the time it takes to learn QWERTY most computer users could surpass their existing typing speed by no more than three or four weeks practice for half an hour a day. But many are unlikely to make the effort until the leading manufacturers produce keyboards which have both the QWERTY and the keyboard layouts on the keyboard.
This is highly unlikely to happen if left to the forces of the free market because, although the investment required is quite small, there is no prospect of the change leading to bigger profits.
It is also unlikely that the public sector will fund such a move. Governments have many other priorities. Individual teachers, who may see the advantages of children and young people learning Dvorak, are not in a position to make the change while computers just have QWERTY engraved on their keyboards.
Change will only happen via the third way, the charitable sector. It requires a philanthropist, rich enough to fund the initial changes and to market them to a sceptical world.
Stand up Bill Gates, who has just announced that he is stepping down as the boss of Microsoft to devote himself to charitable works. The change would enable people to use the Microsoft software more efficiently. And the big beneficiaries would be the children of the world.
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