Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Computer Geek-In-Training

John's been tinkering with Ubuntu Linux on his computer for a few weeks now (he's having a blast...), and keeps threatening to install it on my mac. Not a chance.

I'm helping out in another department at work, in addition to some of the stuff I was doing in my other job. Part of what I'm doing involves using a different interface to access the same data that I used before - I'd been told by the IT geeks that it was much faster but I hadn't given it a shot until last week. And they're right, it IS faster, although I had one problem.

I'm addicted to the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste (if you don't use them, you're missing out), and the interface that I was using didn't seem to support them - it would error whenever I pressed CTRL C or CTRL V. BAH. So I asked the programmers if there were any hacks or workarounds, and they said no.

John said that he thought it could be done, although he didn't know exactly how to do it. So this morning after using my mouse to paste something in for the umpty-leventh time, I started digging around under the hood of the interface. And found the keyboard remapping section. And remapped my keyboard (and my colleague's) so that we can use our keyboard shortcuts. And then marched triumphantly into the programmers' office to tell them that not only was it possible, but I'd done it. By myself.

I was more excited than I should have been...but it was one of those little nuisances that was making a really good interface annoying. FIXED!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

look at you! I'm impressed + I bet those tech guys were too. They probably acted "too kewl for skool" though :)

I love my mac and I'm always looking for shortcuts. Hey, on my old system, I could access a keyboard shortcut page. (you know when you are looking up how to type a special symbol) and now with system 10.4.9 I can't seem to find it... do you know where it is? Figure, you're pretty techy and would know! thanks in advance :)