/home/todd

I’ve been meaning to revamp the photography section of this site for a while now; this weekend, I finally found the time to do it. I registered a new domain, straylightphotography.com, and put together a portfolio consisting of my 20 favorite shots (<shamelessPlug>many of which are currently on display at Interzone through February 28th!</shamelessPlug>). I’m hoping to quickly expand the site with themed portfolios (portraits, urban decay, etc.), but… first things first.

Also, the new portfolio has been an excuse to play with CSS3 and jQuery 1.4.  Visitors using Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Opera should see a site that behaves like it was created with Adobe Flash, but is fully accessible and doesn’t require the proprietary Flash plug-in.  Visitors using Internet Explorer… well… it at least degrades cleanly.  Mostly.

Somewhere along the line, I picked up the habit of mapping the otherwise utterly useless caps lock key to act as another control key.  If you’re an Emacs user, this is sort of critical to avoid the wrist strain of constant pinky-stretches to the lower-left corner of the keyboard.  Its become second nature now, so when I recently found myself working on a Windows-based lab computer where caps lock actually performed as-advertised, the result was a lot of code THAT lOOKED LIKE thIS.  Unpleasant, to be sure.

Linux and Mac OS X make remapping this key extremely easy.  System Preferences on the Mac and the GNOME keyboard control panel on Linux include a simple option to enable.  Tada!  No more wasted space west of ‘A’.  Windows, of course, is a different beast.

The good news: there’s a very simple registry hack to remap caps to control.  Seriously, it’s floating all over the internet.  Except, there’s a wrinkle–you need administrative access to edit the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry tree, which is what all of these hacks do.  For whatever reason, our school has decided computer science graduate students aren’t to be trusted with administrative access to their own computers [another rant for another time], so what’s a wrist-strained user to do?

Muck around in the Windows registry, of course!  It turned out to be pretty straight forward.  There’s a duplicate of the keyboard mapping registry key under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, which non-administrators can modify, and it appears to behave exactly like the key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.  So, for anyone in a similar position, here’s the registry key to modify:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Keyboard Layout\Scancode Map =
hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,1d,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

You can download a registry update file here.  Save it to your computer, double-click it to update your registry, then reboot and enjoy your vastly-improved keyboard.

Let’s start this off by admitting a dark secret: my spelling is atrocious. As an example, I initially typed that sentence as, “Let’s start this off by admiting a dark secret: my spelling is attrocious.“  Built-in spell checking serves as a constant face-saver, but repeatedly finishing a sentence, switching from keyboard to mouse, right-clicking on the freshly-underlined words, and choosing what is nearly always the top choice from the built-in dictionary gets old.  The fact that the computer’s first suggestion is almost always exactly what I tried to type makes me wonder: why can’t the machine automatically correct misspellings?  Spell-checkers already rank the possible solutions, so it seems logical that if the delta of the ranking values between the top two choices is sufficiently large, it would be pretty safe to automatically make the replacement.  If the action was accompanied by some sort of animation or color change (like the highlighting Mac OS X’s Preview performs when searching text in PDF files), the user would be aware the change had been made and could quickly evaluate whether it was correct.  If it is, no need to switch over to the mouse and lose your train of thought; you can keep merrily typing away.  If the correction was wrong, the highlight should remain for a while so that the user can finish typing, then come back to fix any mistaken spelling corrections.

Combining this technique with a machine learning system to detect patterns in a particular user’s misspellings (including the actual word they wanted) you could quickly end up with a highly-accurate spellcorrecter tailored to the end user.  This brings the idea into my area of research, since the result would be a machine-learned program that could hold significant time-saving value to users.  I’ll have to take a closer look at this at some point soon.  In the meantime, I’m just frustrated that such a system doesn’t already exist.

In case anyone else had as much trouble figuring this out as I did… if you want to break up a cell in the Mac edition of Microsoft Excel into multiple lines, you need to hold down the Option and Command keys while pressing Return.  This is a little different than the Windows edition of Excel, where you hold down Alt while pressing Return.  Anyway, it seems to work well, and now I can get nicely-formatted text into my Excel documents!

Backstory: Today in the lab, I found myself listening to some of the old local Detroit bands in my music collection.   It got me feeling a bit nostalgic, especially when some tracks came on from an old friend’s punk band, the Bourgeois Filth.  Shortly before the band split, he’d given me a demo tape of some very rad, very different stuff the band was working on, but I must have lost it years ago… I can’t even remember the last time I had a cassette player, let alone anything to play in one.  I still have their sole CD release, but this afternoon I really wanted to listen through that old tape again.

So anyway, tonight I Googled around a bit.  The band’s old webpage is still up on AngelFire (Seriously?  I had no idea AngelFire was still around…), but hasn’t been updated since their reunion show 9 years ago.  Seems like they never got much attention outside of Detroit; I really can’t seem to find anything useful on the Internets about them.  What I did find, however, was an old-school German FTP listing of MP3 sites that probably went dark a decade ago.  Including, I think, my old dual Pentium Pro basement server.  Near the top of the list is an entry for ftp://216.25.7.132/, sharing albums from such fine musicians as Nine Inch Nails, Green Day, Orbital, and the Bourgeois Filth.  I’m reading through this thinking, “Wow, that’s exactly what I used to listen to…” when I notice one of the band names: Semblance of Self.  That was the name I released my own material under!  Seriously!  As much as I’d like to think that someone found those tunes cool enough to bother mirroring them on their own FTP server, I really can’t believe anyone did.  So… someone’s still linking to an FTP site I ran during the 90′s, and specifically mentions my old band name.  Bizarre!

Tragically, I still can’t seem to find anyone who had a copy of that Bourgeois Filth tape and bothered to encode it into MP3s

Update: Since a few of you have expressed interest, I’ve uploaded the original Bourgeois Filth album.  If anyone has MP3s of their last demo tape, I’d love to get a copy!

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been experiencing horrible performance from Cubase 4.  Audio was popping and crackling like mad, and since it had been a few months since I’d recorded anything, I was going crazy trying to figure out exactly what changed on my computer that was causing the issue.  It seems pretty obvious in retrospect, but it was the on-access scanner included with Norton Antivirus.  For anyone else experiencing a similar problem, try adding your top-level Cubase project directory to the list of folders excluded from your virus scanner.  That seemed to clear everything up for me.

Sadly I’m still having trouble with the MP3 export functionality–ID3 tags aren’t included in anything that comes out of Cubase.  Searching around the Steinberg forums reveals plenty of other users with the same issue, though people with the full version seem to be able to hack around it by copying an older version of the MP3 codec from their installation disc.  As a lowly Cube Essential user, I had to buy the codec separately and the only version I have is obviously buggy.  I put in a support request a couple of days ago but still haven’t heard anything.  Pretty disappointing after spending a couple hundred dollars on their software.