Sorry Chris
ooh, shiny new typo install
freelance once more 2
am back working on my own projects, which does feel damn good. I miss the social life of optus most, weirdly - I'll have to make sure I don't slip back into creepy hermit mode.
also about to move the blog and my online projects over to a new hosting provider, so if you don't hear from me I'm either lost at the bottom of a dark digital well, or as permanently hopeless about updating this thing as I usually am.
I am the Passenger
Thanks to the hackers at http://www.modrails.com/, the blog should be ever so slightly less crashy now. Hurrah!
In other news: still at Optus, working on the InSing portal, enjoying Christmas, not seeing enough shows.
Still hacking a lot of perl and Haskell - my copy of Real World Haskell is already pretty well thumbed.
Ah, management.
"If you have a good enough architecture, it doesn't matter whether your programmers are any good."
not sure I can actually add anything to that.
... upgrade complete
well, that was surprisingly painless. now running on Ubuntu 8.04, and nothing seems to be significantly broken. Rock on. Now, for some git repos…
Swapping shift and control on Mac OS X Leopard 1
I've just bought myself a spanking new ergonomic keyboard, but to my horror, the control key is way down the bottom of the screen.
"This is normal!" you say. Yes, but I use emacs, and it's far too far to reach every second keystroke. I like it where the caps lock usually is, and given that the caps lock is of no earthly use to anyone, it's usually easily swapped in using Keyboard Preferences on the Mac. Too easy!
Unfortunately, as you can see, the typematrix has sensibly done away with the caps lock, replacing it with a shift key the size of tasmania.

Don't get me wrong, gentle reader: I love that key. I salivate over it, entertaining lewd thoughts entirely inappropriate to this family (and frankly dusty) blog. However, I want it for my own filthy purposes: to wit, as a big old Control key. Shift can be demoted to the old control key, which is close-as-dammit to its normal position, and all will be well with the universe.
But oh no! normal keyboard preferences will neither let you remap shift to something else, or remap anything else to shift! How can we fix this? Googling gave me DoubleCommand, which will let you change a few mappings in a distinctly non-orthogonal, non-extensible sort of way, and Ukulele, while an admirable piece of software for changing the mapping of regular keys, has absolutely no truck with modifier key. It looks like we are sunk! But hold! a ray of light on the horizon: an article on mapping other keys to shift using Interface Builder. This solves half of the problem, allowing me to map the piddly little control key to shift. It doesn't give me all of it, unfortunately. The approach can be extended, though: just copy one of the dropdown selectors and change the tag to '1', just like we did for the list of tags. One last little bit: we have to control-click on the new dropdown, select 'modifierMappingDidChange', and drag it to the "File's Owner" object.
and there it is.

it's so beautiful I could cry. But instead, I'm going to bed, knowing that just an hour's hacking has saved me milliseconds. Awesome.
simultaneously proud and chagrined 2
I just defined an emacs macro for the first time.
- it's really, really easy
- it's really, really useful
- i'm sort of embarrassed i hadn't done it before.
things i learned today
for LWP::UserAgent, giving field-value pairs to 'post' sends them in the request. Giving them to 'get' sets them in the header, which is less than useful. *sigh*
anyway, hi. I've moved again since i last posted - back to Gordon this time. Am now working for Optus on a web hacking contract, which is keeping me off the streets and adequately stressed. Oh, and google dev day yesterday. Mad fun, even if Android's not quite as open (or GWT quite as un-java-y) as i'd like…
nerdboy
ok, so that was embarrassing. 11:24 on NYE, and I'm still at home because I got interested in something off projecteuler.net. wonder if anyone's still around…
