Keyboard Layout Creator 1.4

casper — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 13:28:00 GMT

The man of a thousand Unicode characters, Michael Kaplan, recently blogged about the new version of Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator. For those of you who haven't heard about it, it does exactly what the name suggests — lets you create and edit keyboard layouts.

I find Michael's blog fascinating to read on occasion as I have a passing interest in languages and it's always good to see the progress we're making in accomodating all of the world's dialects. Of course, my writing is limited to English, the occasional French, and the (very) rare Japanese so the chances of me running MSKLC seemed slim at best.

As luck would have it, I recently needed to use the quotation mark (") on my iMac at home under XP. For anyone coming from North America, European (and British) keyboards are weird to begin with, but in this case the Apple keyboard drivers had mapped the quotation mark to the diaeresis (¨). They look somewhat similar, but VS doesn't like the latter at all. Copying and pasting a symbol twice every time you need to type a string doesn't quite cut it either, not to mention that it's the exact opposite of agile ;)

So I downloaded the Keyboard Layout Creator and within about five minutes had the problem fixed. In case this is of use to anyone in the UK or Ireland who's running XP with a Mac keyboard (perhaps five other people), I'm posting a link to the installer here. Just run setup, choose the new keyboard in Regional Options, and all will be well :)

[Apple UK Keyboard Layout for Windows (with proper quotation marks)]

Sharing is good

casper — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 10:08:00 GMT

I enjoy learning new things; for that matter I find it rewarding if I can learn something new every day, regardless of how trivial or well-known it is. Yesterday, I was trying to share some files with people over in Redmond: I updating the sharing permissions on the folder, sent then an email, and went home assuming all would be well.

This morning I arrived to see a reply that they couldn't access the share. Extremely confused, I re-checked the sharing permissions and they were still the same as yesterday. Luckily, I managed to catch Brad online and he solved my problem in about thirty seconds flat.

It turns out that since the dawn of the 'My Documents' folder, I've never tried to share one of its subfolders with anyone. I usually have a temp or tools directory where I move things to and add sharing permissions as necessary. Apparently the ACL settings (visible from the security tab) aren't the same on the 'My Documents' folder as other places.

In my case, since I was sharing with other people on a trusted domain, the machine's Users group needed to be added to the Security settings with Read&Execute, and then the sharing permissions worked as expected. Just one of those things that I never realised; like how dilemma is spelt with two m's.*

*There are a number of people who were taught in childhood that the spelling was 'dilemna', although apparently no one can find real proof in a dictionary. I just noticed it this year when reading Michael Pollan's excellent book, The Omnivore's Dilemma and thought he had made a huge mistake. After reading the orgin of the word, di (two) + lemma (proposition), it makes perfect sense for it to be spelled that way, but I swear that someone taught me 'dilemna' growing up.

Adventures of an aspiring agile developer in a not-quite agile world : Windows

Keyboard Layout Creator 1.4

Sharing is good