Setting naming conventions for international audiences straight.

So the place in Budapest where I'm staying is called the K9 Residence.  What I need to say next depends on your native language.  Please skip to the subheading that best describes you.

Native English Speakers

No, the place doesn't have anything to do with dogs, nor can one jokingly say that they "treat you like one".  The name comes from how it's number 9 on the street Karoly Korut, and no one ever alerted them, apparently, that K9 is a common shorthand for "dog" in English.  (Or perhaps they did learn that much, but deemed it too late to change.)

Non-Native English Speakers

Hey, did you know that in English, K9 is a common symbol or abbreviation for "dog"?  Yeah, it comes from how it's pronounced like "canine", the adjective for dog based on its Latin root canis.  Remember that movie K-9?  Yeah, kinda like that.

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Anyway, I don't expect all of this internationalization to go perfectly for everyone, but, well, y'all could have saved me from having to explain stuff to a lot of people of different native tongues...

I'm going to Hungary tomorrow.

That is all.

Taking the anti-mouse campaign ... to the next level

Wow, did you guys know that you can buy domain names now?

And that no one had yet taken "tyrannyofthemouse.com"?

Well, I snapped it up, and it will include a showcase of my programming projects soon.

I also managed to move this blog to the subdomain blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com (as you might have already noticed).  Don't worry, all the old links will still work!

Ending the tyranny of the mouse -- in web browsing

Since I plan to program professionally, I've ramped up my efforts to get by without a mouse, and I thought I'd share some key tools I've used to accomplish this.

For web browsing, the key is Pentadactyl, a Firefox extension that lets you do the things you want from the keyboard. (I would say all the things, but some websites are written so as to be unfriendly to it.) For example, if you want to click on a link, you hit f, and it pops up a keyboard code over every link, and you type the code to "click" on it. Here's what it looks like when you use it:



Other useful features are:
back/forward = shift+H / shift+L
page down/up = space bar / shift+space bar (these work without Pentadactyl)
half page down/up = ctrl + d / ctrl + u
search = / (yes, the slash key), then enter, then n/shift+N to search down/up
go to URL = o, space, [page url] (if you've entered something similar before, you can tab through the cached options)
go to URL in new tab = replace "o" in the above with "t"
open link in new tab: ;t , then it pops up hints as if you had pressed f but opens in a new window

However, you need to configure it a bit in order to get the most out of it. For example, as initially installed, it will remove your ability to use the familiar ctrl +c/v/a (for copy/paste/select all) due to its being based on the text editor Vim. Also, the hint keys (buttons used when creating a code that lets you click a click) are set by default to draw from the numbers 0-9, which are less comfortable to type every time you click on a link, and they are displayed too small to read.

To set your configurations, you need to create/edit a file called ".pentadactylrc" in your home directory. Here are the contents of mine, which fix the above problems:

"1.0rc1

loadplugins '.(js|penta)$'
group user
highlight Hint font: bold 10px "Droid Sans Mono", monospace !important; margin: -.2ex; padding: 0 0 0 1px; outline: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, .5); background: rgba(255, 248, 231, .8); color: black; font-size: 14pt !important;
map -count -modes=i,n,v <C-c> <count><Pass>
map -count -modes=i,n,v <C-v> <count><Pass>
map -count -modes=i,n,v <C-a> <count><Pass>
map -count -modes=i <C-a> <Pass>
map -count -modes=i <C-x> <Pass>
set guioptions=bCrsmT
set hintkeys=asdfwervcxtgq
set hinttimeout=500

" vim: set ft=pentadactyl:

Enjoy your breaking the tyranny of the mouse! (And yes, I composed this entire post, including creating the link, without using the mouse. I may have mentioned that a few times before).

The secret unleased: I will become a software developer!

I know I've kept my readers kind of in the dark, but I just left my day job to attempt a career change into software development and otherwise make sense of all the projects out there that I could improve. I'll be flying to San Francisco today for it, where I'll stay for at least 2-3 months, residing on the luxurious (s)Nob Hill.

Here is the site for the "Developer bootcamp" program, for which I'll be in the Feb/March cohort.

Flight leaves at 1:30 pm, wish me luck!

I'm such a twit...

I didn't think I'd ever see the day, but because of that "thing I applied for" (more on that later) I had to get a Twitter account, and as luck would have it, @SilasBarta was available and I took it.

So you can be reassured that @SilasBarta isn't some dastardly soul trying to impersonate me.

(I was going to make another remark about having made this post purely through the keyboard, but Twitter ruined it ... some of their clickable buttons can't be recognized by Pentadactyl, the Firefox extension that tries to let you do everything from the keyboard but gets stymied by by poor web design.)

Mr. Ford, meet Boeing

You know how it's become a sort of cliche/folk-economics to say that "You should pay your workers enough so that they can buy the product you sell?" It's supposed to be what gave Henry Ford I his tremendous success with the Model T, and has become a staple of union bargaining.

For a recent example of this line of thought, here's none other than (former Secretary of Labor) Robert Reich arguing it, complete with reference to the Model T story.

Well, it recently occurred to me how underpaid I am. My employer modifies and sells large aircraft. No way can I afford that!!!

Did somebody say "raise"?

(This post made entirely without use of the mouse -- including for looking up and copying over links -- thanks to the use of the Firefox Pentadactyl extension. Give it a whirl!)

Addendum: To clarify, Boeing is not my employer, just a synecdoche for large aircraft manufacturers in general.