/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.

Hurray, I finally finished updating this site to use a modified version of the Elegant Grunge WordPress theme.  I hacked in support for threaded comments, so now you should be able to directly respond to one another.  There are still a few visual issues, especially with image borders, but everything seems to be functional.  Please let me know if you notice any problems with the site.

Today I finished working out the kinks in my new photo album workflow.  The result: all of my photo sets since I moved to Corvallis are now available on the site’s Photography section.  I’m keeping the Flickr site for my best photography, but I’ve had all of these images sitting in Lightroom that I suspect friends would love copies of, so now they’re available.

For the curious, I do all of my photo editing in Adobe Lightroom (and occasionally Photoshop).  Using a heavily-modified version of the TTG Shadowbox Gallery Template, I export each album and upload the static HTML and image files to my server.  Nothing terribly exciting there, but now it gets interesting.  I wanted to have an index page that automatically shows all of my galleries, displaying the most recent first.  TTG supplies an XML AutoIndex module that does nearly everything I want, so I integrated that as my index page and hacked the PHP scripts to include better date and description information.  Finally, I wanted to provide an RSS feed of my photo albums, so people won’t need to constantly visit my website if they’re looking for new photos.  A quick modification to the XML AutoIndex script did the trick, so now you can subscribe to an Atom feed of my photo albums!

Everything seems to be working fine for my on Firefox and Safari.  If anyone notices problems with the photo albums or feed, please let me know.