Coding while walking a baby to sleep

Question

I recognize an element of absurdity to this question, but thought it couldn't hurt to ask. My third child will be born any time now, and I envision walking him (her?) to sleep late at night.

In the past, I've tried to listen to things or read a book while holding a baby. This time, having a project I am hacking on for fun, I'd like to be able to do some coding. The whole idea may be a write-off, as loving the child is more important than any such project. In my experience, a baby falls asleep well if you walk around with them. Sitting down, or even standing still near your computer's keyboard, rather hinders the process : )

I was thinking I that, despite the recent Ask Slashdot question which suggests that open source speech recognition is still in its infancy, that surely a recognizer for, well, an vocal keyboard, would work.

I was thrilled to find instructions on using the built-in speech recognition software under OS X (I can use XP or Linux, but would prefer to use OS X) to allow you to command it using a phonetic alphabet. (This PDF shows the symbols they are using -- alpha, bravo, charlie for letters, one, two, three for numbers, pipe, dot/decimal/period, comma, and so forth, for punctuation.) Unfortunately, in my tests using the built-in mic, even without a lot of background noise, the recognition is fairly poor, and I can find no way to train the OS X speech recognizer.

There is a nascent voice keyboard project for Linux. I glanced at the source and it looks like a pain to make it work under OS X.

I really think that a vocal keyboard would be a lot simpler than full-on speech recognition, and the latter, being tweaked for natural language, wouldn't work well for coding; it surprises me that I haven't been able to find much out there. Yes, I have started reading through the documentation for CMU Sphinx, but that rather goes beyond the scope of what I was trying to do -- find something that'll work fairly well out of the box.

Given that the baby is likely to be crying, speech recognition may be out entirely. I know someone mentioned Dasher -- I don't suppose I could run it on my iPod Touch (or Blackberry or Sharp Zaurus!) and control the keyboard on my computer?

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Wear the baby in a sling such as this one to keep your hands free, and then use a tablet PC or whatever you can use while walking about.

Speech recognition just won't work, given the environment.

Answer 2

Use a bluetooth keyboard, hook your laptop up to a projector on a wall in the room, invert colors to avoid making too much light. You can see the screen, use the keyboard every time you pass, plenty of time to plan your algorithm. :-D

Congrats on your third, btw. Good for you.

Answer 3

Speech recognition is not the way to go indeed. And probably because of the sound he or she will make before falling asleep. I think the best way to continue coding while you take care (hum hum) of your newborn baby is to add a DDR dancing mate to your computer. Then you can be coding with your feet. Literally only, I hope.

Answer 4

Dasher is actually a great idea — there is an iPhone/iPod touch version [iTunes link], and at the very least, you could get some coding done there and copy it (via email, or Pastebot, or whatever) to your computer.

And I think combining this with A N Other's solution would make this really easy; that way you'd have a hand or two free to use the app.

Answer 5

Don't "train" the baby to need walking to sleep!!! I've 3 boys and never HAD to walk for them to sleep! (to be honest, the problem is now... with them at 16, 13 and 10... because THEY are using the computer!) Most of the time at night I was handling them in one arm and using the computer with the other without problem (mouse does a great job here!). You can also place him on your desk in a baby-something and he will be happy there if you speak to him sometimes... maybe you'll need a head-phone for the the first days but don't take hime for a walk or you're dead ;)

Anyways, if you walk him, concentrate on the walking and on him, he will sleep faster because he will feel happy and you'll go to the computer faster and I bet you'll do more code... as coding spelling will be very slow and not very good as you'll have to concentrate on the baby, the floor, the cars if any, (maybe the thieves), the spelling, the formating, and... last... the code itself and all this without seeing much the screen...

An option could be a fitness walking machine and you put your notebook on it... :)

Answer 6

Although coding is probably not going to easy whilst walking around, you may want to have a voice recorder for taking notes - I find I have some of my best ideas whilst away from the keyboard (usually when on my bicycle or in the shower) - so having something to hand to record those moment of genius would be useful.

Answer 7

My kiddo enjoyed falling asleep in her bouncy seat (not this one specifically, but similar). I would type on my laptop while bouncing it w/my foot. Worked beautifully until I realized my sleep-addled coding was producing more garbage than usual :^)

Answer 8

Make yourself a Wii-controlled smartboard and code using a projector and onscreen keyboard.

EDIT:
If you do find speech recognition software that'll do what you want, you'd probably need to wireless-headset-mic yourself for it to be usable.

Answer 9

If you have one hand free, you might try a one-handed keyboard layout. I use a heavily modified Mirrorboard layout for coding. That may not work under OS X though. Maybe look into one-handed Dvorak?

Mirror-QWERTY (MirrorBoard for Mac OS X)

Answer 10

lego powered hammock swinger ? fire off a cron job. job done.

Answer 11

If rocking the baby (in a crib) would work instead of walking, you could rig up a crib with some sort of auto-rock gadget in a spot near your computer.