bassistance.de

This little nugget was shared on some internal mailinglist, but deserves more attention. And as usual, blogging about it is a good way for myself to find it again.

To start with, install PCKeyboardHack. Follow their instructions for installation, changing the capslock key to some other keycode (getting to that in a second) and disable the default behaviour.

Now, the suggested use was as an iTerm hotkey. For that, set the keycode to 105 (F13). Then go to Preferences in iTerm, and enable the system-wide hotkey (click into the input, then press your newly assigned caps lock key, it should input F13). Here’s a screenshot showing iTerm 2 and PCKeyboardHack preferences..

I didn’t yet enable the second checkbox, just the first one to toggle to iTerm quickly, usually its already focussed the right window or tab.

Thanks to Robb for sharing it in the first place.

Other uses for the caps lock key?

The signs are rather obvious. And yeah, I’ll be linking to this from Twitter, G+ and Facebook…

Now that this site has a somewhat responsive design (try on tablet and small screens!), next I need to look into discussion options, maybe test Disqus.

Almost a year ago, 28th November 2010, I started a list of must-have OSX software, gather a lot of suggestions via Twitter, comments and email. I updated the post about two dozen times, mostly in December 2010. Its about time to make my own list, based on what I use consistently.

Office

• Fluid as an app container for GMail. Sucks, but the best I could find until Chrome finally supports Application Shortcuts on OSX.
• Chrome as my regular browser, with 1Password, AdBlock, RSS Subscription (restores the RSS icon) and Sight (syntax highlighting for raw files) as extensions
• Adium for IRC, Jabber (GTalk), AIM and ICQ
• Skype
• Keynote when web-based presentation tools aren’t cutting it
• Twitter for Mac, mostly to check other accounts, like @qunitjs, runs only when I need it
• 1Password to generate and mange passwords. Chrome integration is nice, runs also on Windows machine and Android phone.
• Tunnelblick for VPN connections

Development

• Homebrew to install and keep up-to-date tools like git
• iTerm2 as the much better terminal
• Eclipse is still the IDE for the rare Java project
• Sublime Text 2 is becoming my primary editor
• Filezilla for the rare FTP upload
• VirtualBox to test IEs and Windows screenreaders. The only software on this list that sometimes crashes, and its been a long time since it managed to also take down the entire system.

Media

• iTunes for music
• VLC for video
• Picasa for photos

Validating email addresses is a very unthankful business. Whatever you do, you’re doing it wrong. If you follow the spec, users complain about false positives, if you don’t, they’ll complain about false negatives. And you can’t even blame them – in most contexts, “foo@bar” is not a valid address, according to the standard it is (consider “foo@localhost”).

As usual, being pragmatic and having a good testsuite helps. As part of the jQuery Validation plugin, a somewhat comprehensive testsuite came together. The implementation for that is here. That expression wasn’t written by hand, but compiled. Scott González has the tools for that.

With that in mind, what are the html5 email validations doing? While I don’t know what they’re testing against, Schalk Neethling looked up the implementations for Chrome and Firefox. It would be interesting to run those implementations against the testsuite above, and see if there are problems. Anyone interested in helping with that?