Monday, May 18, 2009

its me and my MAC keyboard

From the bunch of awkward situations, one most common and one dat can occur nywhr and nytym is Monkey-in-lab. For the one who is going out of the country for the first tym the occurrence of such situations are inevitable. Uptill now I too had many of them. My first was in my own office and my own computer, the very computer about which I proudly tell to my friends, a 8 core system with 6 GB RAM and Nvidia 8600 GTX. But the main problem with it is dat it is not only a MAC system and to add to ur hardships it has the Danish keyboard. One of the strange thing about the MAC keyboard is the Command button. Its functionality similar to the control button on the windows system but dere is one control button too(yet not sure abt its purpose). And dere is one ms ore extra button called Alt/Gr whose purpose is to act as the third character smthng similar to what shift does but now dere r thre characters on each letter rather than being two only(still amazed why MAC need so much of them characters).For initial few days, one could see the MAC keyboard shortcut or such stuffs opened in my browser, but soon realised their uselessness. Speaking of characters dere r some which still are nightmares for me. Of them are '{', '}', '[', ']' and '\'. I tried very hard and spent almost one of my whole weekend searching for these online but met no success. As one might know about the importance of these to a programmer, for the arrays, blocks and paths. Initially I used to copy them from one place and paste them whenever needed, it was clumsy and boring. But now I have found more elegant way to perform this. Now whenever I need them I just go to the top-right corner of my desktop and from there I toggle to US keyboard and I am with my Danish-MAC keyboard as a US keyboard. I perform my actions den back to Danish keyboard(I am not too good wid US keyboards either, so have to go back for typing ;) ). Hoping for some improvement in my present scenario wid my MAC in coming days.
Now it will be totally unfair and in some ways too rude of me if I donot mention some good(here I mean really good and cool) things about MAC. It has wonderful GUI interface along wid the UNIX kernel which gives me feeling of being at home. And above all is the magic of 8 core processor, Nvidia 8800 and 6 GB RAM(Now, my system will be happy when its RAM will read these stuffs as this page is loaded). There are many more cool things but I havnt explored so deep.

P.S.: This blog has its inspiration from g2's blog about monkey in lab and my prof's wish dat I should write about my experience wid MAC.

5 comments:

sharpe316 said...

Well I hope .....and pray as well....that you get used to the MAC keys soon.....
But ur config really astonished me !!!!!

kumar lav said...

yet it hangs smtyms wen I am doing my experiments :P

g2 said...

nice... when you say g2's post, give a link to the post too :)

your 6 GB memory blah blah MAC also hanged :)

there is some awful way to directly type \.. you have to press 3 buttons at a time... check it out

kumar lav said...

ya its AltGr+Shift+7 for '\' and dere are for others too.. But none works on Emacs editor :(

Prithvi Raj said...

tu maze kar be... :P