I spend a lot of time switching between Linux, MacOS, and Windows
workstations. I do this partly because I am always looking for the best
tools for a given task. Even though modern GUIs are very similar, their
slight differences can be frustrating. I think the root of the
frustration is that the similarities between the OSes makes it
difficult to remember which interface I am dealing with. I am pretty
comfortable using MacOS key combinations when I am using an Apple
keyboard, but if I plug in a MS Natural Keyboard, I start to bump into
things like a caveman driving a car. Here are some tips I have learned
to make the transition between different computers easier on the ol'
noggin.

Contents:

• What
  is a consistency conflict?
• Changing Key Combos
  on the Mac.
• Firefox Key Combos.
• Terminal Key
  Configurations
• Clipboard Complaints

What
is a consistency conflict?

MacOS X tries to maintain a lot of similarities with earlier versions
of itself, and Windows tries to do the same. Gnome and KDE don't have
as long a history, but they do inherit a lot of the same problems from
the Mac and Windows. All of these GUIs have the ability to cut, copy,
and paste, but only the Mac has the command-key (aka apple-key), and it
has always used command-c for copying. When Windows and Linux added
this shortcut, they decided on the control-key. Perhaps it is really
Apple's fault for later adding the control-key to their keyboard, while
keeping the command-key. Therefore, you can never count on control-c
working at any computer you come across. Apple is staying consistent
with Apple, but is maintaining inconsistency with the majority of
installed computers, and by extension Apple is inconsistent with the
training of a much more computer literate society. Though Apple may
have good reason to stay internally consistent, it doesn't preclude
them from becoming more consistent in certain situations. For example,
they can easily offer both the control-c and command-c shortcuts out of
the box. This is not an enormous hurdle for the end user, but it is
akin to the silliness of using the right faucet handle for hot water.

Changing
Key Combos on the Mac.

Double
Command is
an excellent free tool to change key mappings. If you are using a PC
keyboard with your Mac, it will be very beneficial to have Double
Command swap the windows-key and the alt-key, which correspond to the
command-key and option-key on the Mac. I have also noticed that the
windows-key or option-key on a Mac keyboard is almost impossible to
touch type. I can use my pinky to press the control-key, and I can use
my thumb to press the alt-key or command-key. Who were the knuckleheads
that added the fn-key to the Mac and the menu-key to the PC keyboard
where they are most likely to be mistyped? If you really need a
volume-key and a reformat-my-hard-drive-key, could you place it at the
top of the keyboard with the rest of the keys that were inspired by the
usability tips from Pimp My Ride.

Be sure to check out the MacOS keyboard shortcuts under the “Keyboard
& Mouse” system preference. I'm not sure if this is available
before MacOS 10.4 Tiger.

Firefox
Key Combos.

If you switch between Firefox on the Mac and on Windows or Linux, you
may enjoy the href="http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/keyconfig">keyconfig
extension, so you can quit pressing control-t fifty times
trying to open a new tab.

Terminal
Key Configurations

Ninety percent of the problems with terminal configurations are due to
the backspace and delete characters being reversed on the terminal
client
and on the server's terminal. In the Mac's Terminal program, you can
fix this by:

1. Selecting “Window Settings” in the “Terminal” menu.
2. Selecting “Keyboard” from the drop-down menu.
3. Checking or unchecking “Delete key sends backspace”.

After you do this, you may find that a window connected to remote
systems works fine, but that the terminal on your Mac is now spewing
“^H” or “^?” instead of deleting the previous character. You can test
whether the delete-key is sending “^H” or “^?” by running “cat” in your
terminal window and hitting the delete-key. You can check whether the
which character the terminal is expecting by running “stty -a” and you
will either find “erase = ^?” or “erase = ^H” somewhere in the output.
You can set the terminal's erase character by running one of these
commands:

	stty erase '^H'	stty erase '^?'

You will want to put one of these commands in your .bashrc, .cshrc, or
.profile depending on what shell you are running, so that it is set
every time you connect. Even after I fixed this problem, I noticed
another more insidious one. Mutt did not like the delete character that
“cat” was accepting just fine. After I traced this down to the TERM
environmental variable on the Mac being set to “xterm-color”, while my
Linux box was setting the TERM env var to “xterm”. You can fix this by
setting TERM to “xterm”, and mutt will be happy, at least until you
connect with a terminal that doesn't support “xterm” at all. Now that I
knew that the terminal emulation setting was causing the problem, I
could actually search for some real answers. I haven't tried these
solutions yet, but here are instructions on href="http://www.dansanderson.com/blog/archives/terminal/">fixing
xterm-color terminal emulation to work with the Mac's Terminal app,
and here is an amazingly thorough guide to href="http://www.ibb.net/%7Eanne/keyboard.html">Consistent
BackSpace and Delete Configuration.

Your shell and any other program that supports readline has a large set
of shortcuts like move-to-the-beginning-of-line or
move-forward-one-word. You can even edit the href="http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/%7Echet/readline/rluserman.html">readline
init file (/etc/inputrc or ~/.inputrc) to make the shortcuts
easier to use. In the Mac's Terminal app, you may need to go into the
“Window Settings” menu item and set “use option key as meta key” in
order to access some of the readline shortcuts. It's too bad that I
just used Double Command to swap the Apple key and the Alt key on my
Microsoft Natural Keyboard. Ahhhhhhhh.

Clipboard
Complaints

The Mac, Windows, KDE, and Gnome all support command-c or control-c for
copying, but I have become accustomed to the old school method of
copying in XWindow,
and that is by just selecting text. I don't have to press any command,
the text is in the clipboard automatically. Each of these methods has
shortcomings in making a convenient interface.

• If you forget to press command-c or control-c, or if you
  press the wrong one, you will have to find the data again that you want
  to copy.
• If you are using “copy on select”, you have to be careful
  not to selecting anything else as you navigate to the position you want
  to paste to. This is especially annoying when you want to replace some
  text, because you can't select the old text to delete it.

Except for very large selections that may tax your computer's memory, I
think that copying on selection is the preferable interface. However,
the effort involved to prevent the clipboard from being overwritten
before you are ready to paste is a problematic UI. I think it would be
great if I could copy on select, and then use the contextual menu to
view the last three items selected. This is definitely a UI feature for
the power user, but I am almost surprised that this doesn't already
exist. I searched for a potential solution, and the closest ones still
fell short of my goal. The href="http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdebase/klipper/">Klipper
in KDE allows you to store and retrieve multiple clipboards, and you
can have the clipboard list popup under the mouse, but instead of
right-clicking, you have to press a configurable keyboard combination.
This may seem like whining over nothing, but I think lots of people
would be happier for having this nonexistent feature. MacOS X has a
product called CopyPaste
X which provides multiple clipboards in a contextual menu
(accessed by right-clicking), but it doesn't work in Firefox or Nvu,
and the clipboard entries are actually in a submenu of the contextual
menu. CopyPaste X also does not add the ability to copy on select. You
can get the copy on select functionality with the href="http://autocopy.mozdev.org/">Autocopy extension for
Firefox and the GLTerm
or Putty
terminal clients, but I really want this interface feature to be
consistent throughout the OS, and preferably in all the OSes I use.

San Antonio seems to have cornered the market with restaurants having Jalisco in their name. Unlike the plethora of restaurants with Taco in their name, I have a hard time remembering anything but Jalisco, which leads to some confusion since the Jalisco restaurants vary widely in quality. There are two Jalisco restaurants in walking distance from my office, and there is one called Taco de Jalisco that is in walking distance from my house. Taco de Jalisco opened recently and is really good, but I almost didn't try it because of disappointing experiences at other Jaliscos. The new Taco de Jalisco is accross the street from the Witte Museum and next to the Picante Grill, which is another good restaurant although it is very slow at lunch and weekends. There is also an older Taco de Jalisco on Vance Jackson that I have not tried. TJ, as I have christened it, has another heartwarming quality, and that is the fact that is very cheap.

In a few weeks I will be receiving a top of the line dance pad for DDR.
I used to regularly play at an arcade, but it has become harder and
harder for me to make it there on a regular basis. Since the metal
arcade dance pad is very nice, and the inexpensive soft dance pads for
home use are disappointing, I knew that I would have to shell out an
unseemly amount of money for a metal pad for a PS2. Because it took a
lot of time to sift through the various products and reviews to
assemble my home DDR system, I thought it might be useful to
consolidate the information here.
(more…)

One of my pet peaves is reading an online article that claims to
provide useful information but is just a meandering piece of fluff. As
opposed to just writing a tirade as if I were some kind of blogger,
this article will discuss ways to avoid adding more unwanted fluff to
our lives.

Contents:

• What is fluff?
• How to fight fluff.
  • Don’t lie in describing the article.
  • Organize the article.
  • Research the topic.
  • Know when to throw away an article.
  • Let your readers moderate your article.
  • Don’t blog while drunk.
• Summary

What is fluff?

Fluff is definitely in the eye of the beholder. One person’s audience
participation theater is another person’s waste of time, e.g. WWE
wrestling. Fluff isn’t really the problem. It’s the writers who try to
pass off fluff articles as something with substance.

How to fight fluff.

Don’t lie in describing the article.

This is the biggest cause of wasted time. So many articles promise to
reveal great mysteries and to enhance your life, but they don’t live up
to their grandious claims. If you are rambling about some software you
installed, don’t try to pass it off as a product evaluation. Your
writing might be terribly entertaining, but don’t make me skim through
five pages of witticisms looking for a few hard facts. Obviously, many
commercial webzines benefit financially from lying about the contents
of their articles, and they would scoff at my suggestions, since their
job is just to sell ads.

Organize the article.

If you are writing anything of considerable size, it is very helpful to
organize it with paragraph headings or even a table of contents. Also,
don’t try to be funny in your table of contents. I was tempted to use a
bunch of cute taglines in the table of contents, but that wouldn’t help
the reader fight fluff. The Nvu HTML editor
has a nice feature for generating tables of contents for you. I used to
really love Tom’s Hardware for being able to jump to the conclusion of
a product evaluation immediately, since I wouldn’t always need to read
several pages of statistics myself. Unfortunately, Tom’s Hardware has
so many flashing banner ads, that I don’t even want to add a link to
their site on mine.

Research the topic.

In my defense, I spent a whole 5 minutes searching google for
information on writing articles. However, I mainly found generic
academic guidelines for writing. Maybe this is why there is so much
redundancy in blogs. Searching for abstract concepts is hard, but
ranting is easy.

Know when to throw away an article.

At this point, I have only written three, now four, tips on how to
fight fluff. The question I should be asking myself is, “Would anybody
else actually benefit from four measly tips, or should I just accept
the fact that the google ads are the most useful part of my blog.”

Let your readers moderate your article.

Wouldn’t it be nice if slashdot didn’t just let you filter out comments with a low score but also let you filter out articles that are subpar. I guess the Alexa toolbar
does this already, but this still could be a useful feature to add to
blog software, or you could just read your flame mail, since it’s
really only constructive criticism from concerned readers.

Don’t blog while drunk.

It really is only funny to you, unless, of course, you completely embarrass yourself by exposing your deepest feelings.

Summary

This article isn’t anywhere near as useful as I first anticipated, but
I think it will help me in structuring my future posts. This is my
first blog entry, so I am still trying to decide if it is cool if I get
“first post”.