Still early today, and I have learned my first lesson: Always
negotiate first and then make a deal, don't try to change it later. I
was asked to give a talk at the NordU 2003 conference. My talk is
scheduled on Thursday. I assumed now that I am here for the week, that
I would get free admission to the tutorials, if there was
space. Similar to what I am used to from the SANE
conference. Unfortunately it seems that the rules here in Sweden are
different. No free admission for speakers ... As I said, I guess I
should have asked first, before picking the cheaper flight over the
weekend.
Then again, the Internet access is quite decent here, the chairs in
the terminal room are comfortable and I got a nice big Apple Mac LCD
screen to work with. At the actual conference I can go to all the
talks, so I guess I am not missing all that much. If things around
here stay as quiet as they are presently I might even get some work
done.
Here in the terminal room they have these beautiful new iMacs with the
1440x900 flat panel screen. After I had played around for a bit with
all the nice gadgets and got impressed by the sleek performance of
their new Safari Web Browser I decided to get to work and installed
the new rootless X Server Apple is now offering for download. All went
well and I was soon looking at my first xterm. Work could begin, so I
thought, but then it hit me. Where the hell are all the keys on this
Swedish Mac Keyboard? No {, no ], no * not even a $*. Basically
everything I need for programming was missing. Eventually I discovered
that while the keys were not labeled all the necessary keys were
reachable using combinations of Alt and Shift. I went on and even
found how to start the Xquartz server with the swedish keymap applied,
only to discover the in this configuration the Alt key was acting as
Meta and thus lost all its power to create any of my most wanted
characters.
If I ever buy a mac, I would have to get a 3 button mouse and a proper
keyboard with it. I wonder how programmers at Apple work? Maybe there is a
special high clearance programmers keyboard available with all the secret
keys labeled properly and working. This model which would wreck havoc in the
Mac user population, if leaked to the unwashed, easily confused, masses. It
would leave Apples hot-lines go into meltdown as desperate users try to get
help in picking the right keys. What is the world coming to?
