I just cranked up an old machine and pounded some before and after. I'm sad to say that I do not see much of a change; I had high hopes for this. Please understand that my typing is not perfect, and keyboards might not be also.
One truly nutty idea that comes to mind: we might record sound from people's typing and try to pick out how many keys they actually hit. That would not be perfect either, but it could easily turn out to be more objective than my best guess at whether I'm in fact hitting keys and they are not showing up. I am confident that Pharo loses input when under stress. You must think that too or you would not be working on the problem (for which thanks). Before trying sound beyond a basic feasibility test, we should plan what we would do, and decide whether or not it is something we could publish. Some basic thoughts would be that we should capture keyboard events vs. simply edited text - that would prevent problems with the backspace confusing us, and should also tell us what Pharo thinks about the timing of the strikes. The latter should help a lot in aligning the events with sound features; any latencies we uncover might give useful clues too. I _think_ I could find the keypresses in an audio recording; I do some work with wavelets and would hopefully be able to isolate the strikes with thresholding in a suitable scale. Will work for co-authorship :) If anyone is remotely interested and has a microphone already set up, a good starting point would be to send me recordings of a couple of people typing, ideally with a really good touch typist and somebody who struggles a little. If it looks anything like I expect, I can hopefully entice you with a wavelet baed detector and then we would tackle the event capture. Eventually I would envision the usual suspects for the Sprints gathering around preferably an older computer with a shiny new keyboard, but that would happen only when we have a fix and want to compare throughput before and after the fix. I would gladly crunch the acoustic data to the best of my ability. Note that it is preferred to get data sets of an integral power of two in length, which of course couples with sampling frequency (Nyquist offers some suggestions there of course) and duration. Another factor on duration is to record long enough to see a difference. We can work out most of that later, assuming there is interest and we have a fix in hand. I'll stop now :) Bill -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Rueger Sent: Saturday, October 17, 2009 5:55 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Pharo-project] Input problems Hi all, after looking at the different input problems again it seems to me that they might all go back to problems with SharedQueue. Attached is a small change file for all who regularly experience problems with loosing characters while typing or double pastes. Please let me know if after filing in the change set the issues are fixed, less often or unchanged. Thanks Michael _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
