Pixelastic

You know that CapsLock key on your keyboard ? The sole usage of this key is to SHOUT ON TEH INTERNETS§§§. I decided to disable it completly as I never use it on purpose.

I also wanted to use it in vim to toggle between normal and insert mode with one key instead of the default i/Esc.

Disabling CapsLock

Disabling CapsLock is a fairly straightforward process. The xmodmap program is responsible for binding keyboard events to your software and you can change the default behavior by creating an ~/.Xmodmap file.

Just put the following code in it and the pressing the CapsLock key will no longer block your next keys in Caps.

clear Lock

Catching it in vim

Now, to get it in vim, you'll have a little more work to do. First, CapsLock is not one of the default vim keycodes, so you won't be able to remap it to any useful function. To use it in vim, we will hook it directly on xmodmap to another key, one that is part of vim default keycodes.

I choose the virtual F13 key. Your physical keyboard might only have F keys from 1 to 12, but the internal software seems to be able to react to 37 of them. So, why not using them ?

In your ~/.Xmodmap file, this is as easy as adding the following line

keycode 66 = F13

66 is the internal code for the CapsLock key. We just define that pressing the physical CapsLock key should trigger the F13 virtual key.

Now, in ~/.vimrc, we will tell vim to explictly listen to extended F keys (from 13 to 37) which it does not do by default.

set <F13>=^[[25~

^[[25~ is the special keyboard code sent to vim when the F13 key is triggered. Here we just define that such a keyboard code should be interpreted in vim as an <F13> vim key.

Now, you can use <F13> in your custom vim mappings

Toggling normal/insert mode in vim

vim accepts two kinds of mapping. Those triggered in normal mode (using nnoremap) and those triggered in insert mode (using inoremap).

Here we want that pressing CapsLock (or <F13> in vim as we defined) in normal mode will go to insert mode, like pressing i does. And we also want to get back to normal mode when pressing CapsLock in insert mode, just like pressing Esc does.

nnoremap <F13> i
inoremap <F13> <Esc>l

Notice the l after Esc. It is here to prevent the caret to move back one character when exiting insert mode.

Fixing the shell

One last thing to fix is your shell. By defining in xmodmap that pressing CapsLock would trigger an F13 event, it means that whatever software that react on F13 will now react on CapsLock. Unfortunatly, zsh does react on F13. It insert a ~ character on it (just like it does with F12).

To disable it, we'll simply define a key binding in ~/.zshrc so pressing F13 does nothing.

bindkey -s "\e[25~" ""

Here it is. You can now press CapsLock anywhere and it won't have any effect. Plus, pressing it in vim will toggle insert/normal mode.

This morning I started reading a lot of online blog post, framework description and other webdev material online I had in my bookmarks. After reading them, I saved them on my pinboard account to find them easily later.

Lot of good JS and CSS framework/libraries in there, I hope to be able to test them soon.

I also check my mailbox and respond to mails from my normal job. I shouldn't. I'm on a day off, I have to force myself to completly cut out those external calls.

Now, let's the work begin

Anyway, I finally finished the vimtutor. I still have a some difficulties to remember the mapping of the basic hjkl movement keys (I always want use k to move down instead of j). However, I feel confident enough in it to try writing my new code in it.

So, I headed to the Rails for Zombies tutorial. I thought it was free but the "win $5 worth of online teaching" / "next course costs $5" make me doubt it a little. Well, we'll see.

After registering to it, I wanted to save my login and password to KeePass as I always do.

Unfortunatly, KeePass on my Ubuntu machine works by using mono, and the keyboard interaction weren't that good (caret is slightly misplaced, inputs lags before getting displayed, text selection is weird). So I thought "Hey, let's see if there is a new version". Big mistake.

It appears that there was indeed a new version, a real one, with apt-get and stuff while mine was some hackish install I manually made a few month ago.

But wait, this means manually adding a ppa directory. No big deal, I trust the author. What ? Still doesn't work ? Hmm, I see. I need mono 2.6, and I only have 2.4.

What ? 2.4 is the latest available version on Ubuntu 10.10 ? You mean I must upgrade to 11.04 ? Hmm. Why not. I'll have to do it eventually, so let's go.

So I ran all my updates, to have the most up to date system. Unfortunatly, language-pack-gnome-fr doesn't want to upgrade so the OS upgrade isn't displayed.

Wait, what am I doing ?

And that's when I remember that my initial wish was to learn Ruby on Rails and that I was now on the road to upgrading my whole operating system. That is not exactly speaking procrastination, but it makes me do so much other things that my initial goal that I really looks like it.

I finally managed to purge my packets, upgrade to 10.10 and then to 11.04. But this took me 4 hours, and now it's 11PM and I guess I won't start this rails tutorial today, after all.

Starting June 15th, I'll stop working at my day job for one day a week. Instead, I'll use this time to work on personal projects.

After more than 3 years of freelancing, I've been working full time for a very nice young company (making a great social game) for the past 6 months. Today, with the public release of the game, I find myself missing freelance.

I liked being able to sleep when too tired, working late at night when really productive, reading a log of blog posts on various subjects, learning new cool stuff other did. I kinda miss that on my new job.

Sure our project is damn cool and I really like working on it. I learn a lot, in fields that I was interested in but never had the chance to explore (server administration, CDN configuration, memcache, large number of users, etc).
But on the other hand, I'm almost only doing server-side work. I relatively interesting part of Javascript (nothing fancy) and a really small part of CSS.

And I miss all that front-end part of the job. I also get kind of tired of using cakePHP. I do like it a lot, but the more I write PHP and read posts about Ruby, the more I want to switch.

Working 4 days a week

I finally made a deal with my boss, for not working on Wednesday. I want to use that time to relax and learn all those things.

The last time I was working full time for a company, I finally quit because I thought I was waaaaaaay late behind all the current tech trends. It took me a couple of month to learn the cool stuff I'm armed with today : jQuery and cakePHP.

This time, I want to re-learn a whole new world, a better one. Using all I learnt those past years to make a fresh start.

What I want to learn

There's a lot of things I would love to learn, unordered :

• vim : I want to be able to write code on any machine, easily, and fast
• ruby / rails : I want to learn Ruby to be able to fully understand Rails. I have a pretty strong knowledge of cakePHP so I guess Rails won't be too hard for me.
• git : I like Mercurial, but git seems to be the de-facto VCS for all the social geeks and rails coder, so why not ?
• sass and haml : Those seems awesome, and were part of the things that make me want to try ruby. Writing CSS and HTML in a non-painful way. I already want to write modules (or are they called gems?) to enhance them, adding webperf optimisations on the fly (creating sprites/dataURI, optimizing selectors, etc).
• CoffeeScript, Kafeeine or equivalent : Following the logic behind sass, I want to be able to write Javascript easily. I always encounter issues when my jQuery code became too big, everything gets tangled together. Backbone.js seems interesting too. I'll have to test all those solution.
• nodejs : Because it looks kinda fun. I haven't really understand how it works yet, but it looks fun anyway :)
• TDD : This is not a technology, but a way of writing code that I want to learn. I tried it in cakePHP, but I spent so much time writing tests (and making them work), to finally change the implementation and broke the tests that I finally gave up. I still have to understand HOW to do it properly. I thought I read somewhere that this principle was directly intergrated into Ruby (or was it Rails ?) development.

To summarize, I want to learn the good tools that will let me focus on the project(s) I want to make, not fighting to use tools to bend them to my needs. Writing "uncompiled" css, html or Javascript and having some automation tool to automatically transform it in the most usable version to use only.

Also, I have already written a pretty decent cakePHP CMS, with a full featured admin panel that I used when making website for clients. I wanted to put it open source for all to enjoy but never really knew how to do it. I don't yet know if I want to create a whole new CMS in Rails, or if I'll do custom dev for each project, or use (and enhancing) existing CMS.

That's all for now

I might have forgotten stuff (I'd want to try couchDB/mongoDB, getting better at using Linux everyday), but here is a dump of all the things I want to achieve in the next 6 month, one day per week. I'll try to post a summary of what I learned each Wednesday, hoping that it would help others (I know I'll surely enjoy looking back at it later).