Blog

Here is a picture of the John Honcock Center from my car.

Last weekend I went to the Chicago Auto Show and enjoyed almost all of it. Here is a picture of a kick-*** Mercedes-Benz S66 AMG! Enjoy! 😀 Click on the picture for a larger version.

The phone system of US State Department National Visa Center is pretty bad. I have been trying to get a hold of a person to update the address for an approved visa but haven’t had any luck. The worst part is the fact is that instead of making you hold and put in a queue so the next available personnel can answer your questions they make you call them back! :-O So far I have called them several times over a 4-hour span but haven’t been able to get a hold of anyone. 🙁

Here is a screenshot of my current KDE desktop.

Lately I have noticed that a poker spam bot keeps hitting my website almost every other day. Now it is starting to annoy me because I have to manually delete these comments, and thats just a pain. Luckily there is a captcha module available for drupal and I am currently working on setting it up. I think I will have to upgrade to drupal version 4.5.2 (currently I am running 4.5.0, I think). Let’s see how it all goes…

Lately I have had some time to think about life and its purpose so after spending some time thinking on mine today I decided to look around the internet and see what was out there. In my search I ended up at this site: Health, Wealth & Happiness. It has very interesting content, for starters checkout the article titled "How to Know What Your True Purpose in Life is." Also there is another interesting article titled "I want the Earth Plus 5%"; it does not have anything to do with the my original goal but it sure is quite interesting.

I am always looking for ways of making my "computing environment" better and more efficient. A friend of mine (Ryan Doom) pointed out how rarely we used the Caps Lock key suggesting that I should assign the backspace key to it. This sounded like a good idea because right now I have to reach so far out to get to the backspace key (top-…….-right-……-hand corner…) so I decided to give it a try… In order to assign the backspace key to the caps lock key in Microsoft Windows you have to modify a registry key. Don’t worry because SharpKeys can make this a breeze, with SharpKeys you don’t have to know either the key codes nor the HKEY_BLAH/BLAH/BLAH…

By now I have been using my keyboard with the new assignment for a few months and got really used to it. I had to revisit this a few days ago when I decided to try out linux much more thorougly than I had before. Doing this assignment in linux was a little more work because I had to modify the keyboard layout file for console and then do another reassignment for X. Below is what I did to accomplish these two tasks; I am using Arch Linux with the default QWERTY layout so you might have to do a few things differently depending on the distro that you prefer…

To change the default keyboard layout

1. cd to /usr/share/kdb/keymaps/i386/qwerty
2. Copy the us.map.gz to a new file myus.map.gz

3. Edit myus.map.gz using your favorite editor and change the line keycode 58 = Caps_Lock to keycode 58 = BackSpace
4. Change the default keyboard layout file that will be used by editing /etc/rc.conf and changing the line that says KEYMAP=us to KEYMAP=myus

This will change the default layout for consoles, you can load the new layout immediately by running the command loadkeys myus otherwise the default layout will be loaded when you restart the computer. Now to change the layout in X

1. Create a file called .xmodmap in your home directory with the following code

! Swap Caps lock and backspace.
remove lock = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = BackSpace

2. If you are already in X then just run xmodmap ~/.xmodmap. If not then start your favorite desktop environment and run that command.

I presonally prefer KDE and am still working on finding the best way to automatically run the xmodmap command when KDE starts. So far I have created a file that runs this command in the ~/.kde/Autostart but that didn’t seem to work. I will do some more research and post an update once I get it figured out.

2005-04-28: You can easily install the keymap in debian using the install-keymap command.

Finally my website is back online, what took so long? Well, firstly I was in the process of moving from Michigan to Wisconsin, a six hour drive and then I have been debating whether to host the website at home or get it hosted somewhere. Hosting at home would have costed me a 12 month commitment to a 1.5Mbps/512k DSL service and a few extra bucks, whereas by getting it hosted somewhere I can get 3Mbps service at home with no commitment (with a few ports blocked). I ended up not hosting the website at home because that seemed like the better option. Surely I won’t have as much control as I did before but after thinking about this I guess I won’t mind that too much (atleast for now).

Lately I have been very busy messing with Linux and setting up things here and there. I think I am getting much better at it and getting a hang of the whole deal. All of this has costed me quite some time and here is my justification for it: I am a computer scientist and this is a computer :). You might ask why not do all this on Windows? Bottomline, Windows is much easier. For the first timers setting up wireless in Linux can take quite some time (~four or five hours) but by the time you are finished you will know quite a lot about; how wireless internet works, terminology, etc. After my last experience I think I know whats going on and I can probably setup wireless in a few minutes. Note that your mileage will definitely vary because there are way too many variables. Oh well, on to the next task.