Have you heard about Dvorak? It’s a better keyboard layout than QWERTY. The hands move less and so one types faster and energy is saved plus the muscles of the hands do not overwork or something. Well, I don’t know exactly all the advantages. You can see for yourself.

Dvorak seems to be so much better and I have wanted to take on Dvorak for a long time. I have to type a bunch of special characters and stuff so that has kept me off it but I eventually decided to go on with it. So, I have re-found this great free Dvorak course site Dvorak.nl and I am doing the courses. I have done the first lesson yesterday and I’ll do the rest later. Hell, I won’t even re-place the keys on my beyboard, I’ll just learn it on that site and proceed using it. And if I don’t like it, I’ll switch back. Hope that won’t be the case, though.

UPDATE: I got back to QWERTY due to practical reasons soon after that. I guess it would be easier for me to switch in the future, though.

Rounded corners are catching on quickly and so I was looking for an easy way to do them. There are quite a few ways already but most of them involve divs in divs in divs in divs etc. That is difficult to read, it’s easy to get confused if you are editing the code and also it eats up traffic.

Now, I have another way of doing this. I couldn’t say I invented this but I have definitelly at least re-invented this, because I haven’t seen it used anywhere before. I got this idea while doing Bluido. My way is XHTML valid, works on all major browsers (tried with success on IE, Opera, Mozilla Firefox). Furthermore, my manner of doing rounded corners requires no additional CSS stylesheet as the style is included already in the code. The best thing about it is that you can get by with only one single div. Althouh it might perform slightly better if you have a few but even in that case they do not seem confusing as they would all include text. This way uses images and I am, by the way, using a somewhat unusual way to get them, although I am pretty sure there are many other ways.

To talk about the downsides, I would go with the following ones. Firstly, your title text in the div must not be larger than the height of your rounded corner image. That is usually no problem though. Secondly, you must keep a little empty space at the bottom of every div (which is usually not a big problem too). And finally, the biggest problem about this design is that you do not have a text-margin in your div by default. If you want to have a margin, however, you have to add another div (that is extremely easy but I said it is a single-div design, huh) or slightly modify the code to make the image position absolute (I have not tested that yet). In addition, because of that, if you want to get by without divs or other elements, you should not use very long titles. In any case, it might be possible that this way is not for everyone but I don’t see any good reason why most designers couldn’t use it.

Okay, enough talk. Here it comes. You are going to need to do a few steps:

1. Get the images. For this I have used the generator of Google (well, they didn’t want it to be that kind of a generator, but that only makes stuff cooler, huh). But you could use Cornershop. Or whatever you like.
   For the sake of my example, name the files tr.png, tl.png, br.png and bl.png (top right/left, bottom right/left) accordingly.
2. Now it gets simple. Just copy and paste this code in your HTML:
   <div style=”background: #000000; color: #F0F0F0; font-family: Verdana;”> <img src=”tr.png” style=”float: right;” alt=”" /><img src=”tl.png” alt=”" /><br /> Rounded corners made by <a href=”http://www.lyzazel.com”>lyzazel</a>. <br /> Some text here<br /> <br /><img src=”br.png” alt=”" style=”float: right;” /><img src=”bl.png” alt=”" /></div>

I am not the biggest fan of digg out there. What I am saying is, I don’t spend hours browsing it. However, whenever I come to the digg’s front page I can pretty much all the time see at least a few stories from the Top 10 which interest me. I thought, maybe I could subscribe to the Top 10 RSS feed, but it seems such an option is not available. Well, too bad.

Maybe I should subscribe to the sciences stories feed as these are often good. Who knows, I could be posting this from the future.

P.S. This is the 14 of March. The pi day (3.14). “How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!” - there you go, pi to 14 places. Oh well…

I have been going for long without a RSS reader. I thought I would just rather go the sites and read the news. However, I got into time savings lately (even though I don’t really have something to save time that much for yet).

Firstly, I thought I would get a plugin. I used to use Sage for my Firefox some time before but that just didn’t catch on and I switched back to going to the blogs directly. Then I thought of getting a piece of software. But there is a problem with that: I would not be able to easily read the blogs when I am using another computer. So, I created an account in Bloglines and added some feed URLs there.

They have quite a few upsides. The menu is intuitive enough, it’s easy to manage your feeds, it has some kind of a search system and also it loads fast. Though, I don’t really want to run my blog there and there is no need to keep linking to the blog page on your site, thank you, Bloglines. And if I go to bloglines.com, it does not seem to redirect me to the feeds page which is the only one I’m interested in, even if I am logged in.

Overall, I still like it. I did not mention some of its good points just because they are so obvious, and yet they make it really useful. I guess I’ll just stick to Bloglines for some time…

And should anything happen, there is always Google Reader.