2014-02-01

I'm being laid off ...

... so I'm looking for work. Though I've been a programmer most of my professional life, I've spent the last four years doing document schema design and ontology. I have survived quite a lot of generations of programming technologies, so I am nothing if not adaptable. For any given tech-of-the-moment, my answer is "I may not know it yet, but I will know it very quickly."

If you, my readers, know of anything either in New York City or its environs, or in telecommuting land (I've been working mostly-at-home for the last four years, and especially in the past year), I would certainly like to hear about it. Here's my resume in Word and PDF formats, and you can contact me at cowan@ccil.org.

Update:  After working a bunch of short-term consulting jobs, I am now employed full-time as a back-end programmer and team lead at Tablet Hotels, an online travel agent specializing in boutique and specialized hotels, which we check out individually.

2014-01-07

U.K. Whacking Latin Keyboard for Windows

I'm announcing my UK Whacking Latin family of keyboard drivers for Windows.  They allow you to type more than 900 different Unicode characters, without interfering substantially with the regular use of a UK keyboard.  The way in which the additional non-ASCII characters are reached is by using the AltGr key.

The keyboards are designed for people who use the regular or extended UK keyboard heavily, but occasionally need to type other Latin letters (especially accented ones), symbols, and punctuation.  In particular, the keyboard supports the Windows-1252 (U.S. and Western Europe) repertoire, as well as almost every Latin letter in Unicode.

This keyboard handles only the extended Latin alphabet.  If you want a regular Greek, Russian Cyrillic, or full IPA keyboard, I recommend the standard Microsoft Greek keyboard, the Russian Phonetic YaWert keyboard, and the Benct X-Sampa keyboard respectively.

If you want a similar keyboard driver for the US physical keyboard, use my Moby Latin keyboard driver instead.

There are two basic ways to type characters other than the regular ASCII set. A few characters are directly typed by holding down AltGr and pressing another key.  For example, to type the character æ, simply type AltGr+a.  As you might expect, the capital version Æ is typed as AltGr+Shift+a.  However, the great majority of characters are typed using AltGr plus some key, followed by another key that doesn't use AltGr. For example, the letter a with diaeresis (ä) is typed with AltGr+; (that is, AltGr plus semicolon) followed by a, or by A if you want the capital a with diaeresis (Ä).

Combinations like AltGr+; are known as "dead keys", because they appear to be dead when you type them; you need to press a following key to actually input a character.  The current version, F, of the Whacking Latin keyboard has a total of 33 dead keys.  23 specific accent marks and modifying strokes are provided, as well as curly quotation marks and other punctuation, math symbols, Roman numerals, fractions, arrows, pointing hands, math Greek letters and symbols (no accents), obscure Latin letters, and a subset of IPA letters needed for English.  (Some math symbols were taken from the space cadet keyboard.)  Some of these dead keys are typed using AltGr+Shift, which makes them a little awkward to type, but they are intended to be as easy to remember as possible.

Update: There are four variants in the Whacking Latin family:  Whacking John, which is meant for English only; Whacking Sandy, which is meant for English and Scottish Gaelic; Whacking Mick, which is meant for English and Irish; and Whacking Taffy, which is meant for English and Welsh.  They all have the same repertoire of characters, but the last three variants make it easier to type texts in those specific languages.  Whacking John is upward compatible with Microsoft's UK keyboard, and Whacking Sandy with Microsoft's UK Extended keyboard, except for the AltGr combinations on those keyboards.

You can look at the README file to see the full range of characters that can be typed.

These keyboards and the associated documentation are Open Source, and may be freely copied and modified.  The license terms for all is the MIT License.  Use, share, and enjoy!