Helge Gudmundsen's blog

International times

I have a problem with keyboard layouts. As I earn my living as a programmer, it is imperative that I have easy access to the various keys and characters that are normally used for programming purposes (braces, brackets, greater than-signs etc.). Invariably, international keyboard layouts shift these around to make room for local characters. As a norwegian living in Portugal, I need to access both norwegian and portuguese letters, as well as to the keys I use in my daily work. So far I have had three keyboard layouts active, and switched between them with a keystroke, but this becomes cumbersome, as the keys have different positions depending on which layout is selected, and also on which OS I run. I have therefore now standardized on one keyboard layout (English), and have defined special key bindings for the characters I need frequently. For instance, pressing CTRL-Z followed by N and A, gives me "å". The key combinations have a mnemonic component. CTRL-Z is my "trigger", and then the N means Norwegian. The next keystroke is the letter to modify. CTRL-Z P A gives the portuguese modification of A, which is "ã".

Editor

While TextMate remains my text editor of choice, I have lately been looking into emacs. My attention was raised as I read some articles regarding org-mode as a tool for day planning, and I downloaded AquaMacs emacs to start playing with it. I think it will be worth learning emacs for this mode alone. org-mode is a highly capable note-taking and planning tool, and best of all, the data format is human readable plain text.

Site down

So, for some days I could not access my sites via http. After lots of headscratching, the solution was too simple: start apache. Duh!

RegExCentral

To to learn Ruby On Rails, I have decided to make an application that lets me play with regular expressions. For the first version, I simply want to create a field where I can enter a regular expression, another field that lets me enter sample text, and a button that runs the regular expression over the sample text and shows the match status in a third field.

Installing blosxom for the blog.
Creating the application with Rails.
Using mercurial for source control.

Computer stuff

So what am I up to these days? Apart from procrastinating on finishing the monome, I am currently getting my feet wet with metaprogramming using Ruby. Dave Thomas of the pragmatic programmers has a nice series of screencasts on the subject, which not only teaches metaprogramming, but also gives a very good overview of the ruby object model. Also I am trying to teach myself PhotoShop.

Preparation

Having installed blosxom on my server, I struggled a bit to get the URL to work properly. I did not want to have the path to and name of the cgi-script visible in the URL, and ended up using a RewriteRule in the .htaccess-file to manage it. Finding the right rule was a bit tricky, but now I have it working.