I am enjoying OSX and the Macbook Pro, but I was initially finding it difficult to train myself out of familiar Windows keyboard shortcuts like Control-X to cut the clipboard and Alt-D for the location bar in Firefox.

Here I’ll describe the steps I took to add Windows/Linux compatible shortcuts for the clipboard and Firefox to OSX. I also describe how to make Emacs in Terminal.app work better.

To add the the shortcuts, go to “System Preferences : Keyboard and Mouse : Keyboard Shortcuts”

Clipboard shortcuts:
Click the “+” button. Enter “Cut” the menu title and press “Control X” in the keyboard shortcut field. Do the same for “Paste” (Control V) and “Copy” (Control C).

Firefox shortcuts:
Click the “+” button and select “Firefox” for the list of apps. Add a shortcut for “Open Location…” (Alt D) and “New Tab” (Control T).

At this point you can use either the Mac or the Windows keyboard shortcuts and have the right thing happen.

Advanced options: Emacs

If you happen to be an Emacs user, you need to do one additional thing to make sure these shortcuts don’t interfere with Emacs. For example, “Control-V” should paste in every application except terminal, since that would break the Emacs “scroll-down” function.

Once again, click the “+” button and select “Terminal” under application. Enter “Cut” the menu title and press “Command X” in the keyboard shortcut field. This will disable the mapping of Control X in the terminal.

You’ll also want to take these additional steps to ensure that Terminal sends keys through to Emacs:

Under “Terminal : Preferences : Settings : Keyboard”, check “Use Option as Meta key”. Under Keys, remap the Home, End, Page Up, and Page DOwn keys to send these strings to the terminal.

Home = \033[1~
Insert = \033[2~
Remove = \033[3~
End = \033[4~
PageUp = \033[5~
PageDown = \033[6~

Many users have noted difficulties with GPS in Beyond411.

I’ve investigated and discovered that the web service I am using for reverse geocoding is incorrectly returning empty results in many cases.

I have notified the providers of the web service; I will post an update as available. I believe it should be possible to fix this on the server with no client changes.

I am getting really sick of watching this rerun for umpteenth time.

Once again, one party is offering tax cuts as an effective strategy to win elections, while the other party argues that those tax cuts will only benefit the wealthy.

If we can talk about race like adults, why can’t we discuss taxes like fiscally responsible adults?

When the government is consistently running a deficit, in both good times and bad, there’s no such thing as a tax cut.

Deficit spending disguised as a tax “cut” is just a loan from the government that we’re going to have to pay back with interest.

Once we realize that the offered tax cuts don’t really exist we can move forward on the debate.

The debates over class warfare and income distribution obscure this simple truth that all sides should be able to agree on.

We should come together on a consensus around simple fiscal responsibility. I am disappointed to see that McCain is backing away from his previous commitment to balanced budgets and that neither Obama nor Clinton seem to be able to introduce new thinking and language to the debate.

I found these comments by John Doerr on Green Tech interesting.

The notion that we need “reindustrialize” the planet matches my sense that the first industrial revolution was a hack that has no chance of continuing to scale or endure. Our next president must rearchitect markets so that “the right thing to do is the profitable thing to do, so that it becomes the probable thing to happen.”

“To get solutions that scale, we are going to have to find answers that are economic for all people everywhere. We are going have to use policy to harness innovation to make sure the right thing to do is the profitable thing to do, so that it becomes the probable thing to happen. There’s more money that flows through markets in a day than all the word’s governments in a year…

The energy market is $6 trillion. I like to say it’s the mother of all markets. Compared to that Internet, which is a big deal, this is much bigger, much more exciting. But the challenge is much larger. Going green–solving that problem will be largest transformation on the planet.”

Doerr said the entire planet needs to “reindustrialize” to adopt less-polluting forms of energy.

Many people have called for the equivalent of an Apollo Project or Manhattan Project in the United States to solve the energy challenge. But Doerr said that those, which were multibillion-dollar, single-government agency projects, “fail miserably to convey the size of the challenge.”

To underscore how little is being done at the federal level, he said government funding in U.S. research and development on renewable energy was less than $1 billion last year, while oil giant Exxon makes $1.1 billion in revenue a day…

He predicted that the three leading presidential candidates will address climate change regulation far more aggressively than the current Bush administration, which has opposed mandates and sought to stay outside United Nations-led climate talks.

Despite Doerr’s concern for inadequate action on clean energy, he touched on the question of an investment bubble in green tech. Overall, he said there isn’t a bubble, but he does see some problems.

“There’s too much money chasing too few good ventures, despite the size of this problem,” Doerr said.

From an interview of the Post’s Editor-in-Chief by MediaBistro:

We’ve really fallen behind the times here. We are in the process of designing a Web 3.0 generation website that we hope will leapfrog where the current news industry is, ideally, and create a reader news experience that has not been imitated in the industry.

We’ve hired the biggest name in the design profession: Roger Black. His work includes the New York Times, Bloomberg and Houston Chronicle. He has created a design that we’ve very excited about. … The goal is to go live in mid-May…

I’ve long believed that the era of newspapers determining what is fit to read, as the New York Times might say, is over and the key to web design going forward is allowing the reader to take control of their news experience.

The digital era allows us to take our readers along with us on the experience with news. Our design achieves that with the creation of inline video service to “news cubes” that allows people to flip in one direction and get different kinds of contact and flip another direction and get video, databases, interactives or ask a question of a field of experts.

I’ve long believed that news sites need to break themselves entirely from the vertical construction that the newspaper industry has relied on for years. … We’re doing a horizontalization of the news: If there’s a topic, a person, a location, or event, calendar event or news event that you’re interested in, you can horizontally slice the database of our news and find things. … It will also allow you to track whatever person or topic you want on a daily basis just by coming back to the theme page. … We’ll create 15-20,000 RSS feeds on narrow-casted themes. This will meet people’s specific news interests.

We’ll also create online communities, an area where people can socially network around the news. So people interested in unique topics or subjects will have this online community where they can share news and comment to each other. … We’ll have a ‘blogger in chief’ for each community. … They will most likely not be a Times staffer. .. We hope to launch 25-30 communities this summer.

The Subversion Merge Fairy and associated documentation is now hosted as a Google Code project at http://code.google.com/p/svn-merge-fairy/.

Please contact me if you are interested in write permissions to contribute changes.

(The Merge Fairy is a Python script that automates the process of merging changes from one Subversion branch to another, based on an XML configuration file that describes branches and their dependencies. For example, you might want bug fixes from the release branch to be automatically merged to the trunk branch.

In the event of a merge conflict or a build failure after merging, the Merge Fairy sends email requesting help from a human to make a manual merge, resuming automated merging once this done.)

I have my Facebook privacy settings to only show my friends to "My Network and Friends".

But my public Facebook page republishes a sampling of my friends, without my permission.  It also reveals my Facebook user ID in the query string.

Facebook has changed their public pages to reveal increasingly more information about users, without adequately collecting consent.

For too long, rather than engaging in constructive debate, Democrats and Republicans have mocked one another.

This has worked out badly for all of us. It has undermining our sense of common purpose. It has lead us to rash, unbalanced decisions from both sides of the aisle, rammed through without proper debate.

In his speech on financial regulation, Obama works to break free of the Democratic vs. Republican rut and move to a bipartisan consensus on restoring free and transparent markets, which are the best way to promote the common good.

Americans have pursued their dreams within a free market that has been the engine of America’s progress…

But the American experiment has worked in large part because we have guided the market’s invisible hand with a higher principle. Our free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it.

That is why we have put in place rules of the road to make competition fair, and open, and honest. We have done this not to stifle – but rather to advance prosperity and liberty…

The core of our economic success is the fundamental truth that each American does better when all Americans do better; that the well being of American business, its capital markets, and the American people are aligned. 

I think all of us here today would acknowledge that we’ve lost that sense of shared prosperity. 

Under Republican and Democratic Administrations, we failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practices.

We let the special interests put their thumbs on the economic scales. 

The result has been a distorted market that creates bubbles instead of steady, sustainable growth; a market that favors Wall Street over Main Street, but ends up hurting both.

More excerpts below.

(more…)

CIO magazine has published a video on how to Install and Use Six Free Killer BlackBerry Apps. Included in the list is Beyond411, along with Viigo, Worldmate Live, Google Maps, Facebook for Blackberry, and TwitterBerry.