It’s all just 1’s and 0’s…

Small update below (the powerpoint user interface is even more hideous than I thought) Am I missing something glaringly obvious in Powerpoint? (Yes, I have to use Powerpoint, don’t ask.) As far as I can see, you can do pretty much anything with keyboard shortcuts in Powerpoint:

• Change to Italics (⌘I) or Bold (⌘B)
• Change the font-size (Shift-⌘< and Shift-⌘>)
• Change the indentation level (Shift-⌥→ and Shift-⌥←)
• Insert a new slide (^M)
• Switch between slides (page-up and page-down)
• Switch between slide input and notes input (F6)

With the above things you can pretty much create a whole presentation completely using the keyboard. But there’s one very basic thing that compels you to use the mouse: there is no way to switch between the title text box and the main body text box!

I have searched and searched, but to no avail. Please LazyWeb, tell me that there is such a keyboard shortcut…

Update: A reader commented that in outline view, you can use the tab key to get from the title to the body of a slide. When I tried to test this, I found some really horrible usability problems.

First of all, there is only one way to get to the outline view, using the small button on the bottom-left of the window. It’s not listed in the “View” menu and if you switch to outline view, the “view” menu looks odd, because there is no checkmark next to the current view.

When I did get to the outline view, I tested the Tab key shortcut and the behavior of the tab key is really odd: If you’re on a line, it will indent the line like Shift-⌥→ and Shift-⌥←. However, if you are on a Title line, it will indent that line and move that line to the body of the previous slide!.

So yes, it does allow you to go from the title to the body of a slide, but to do so you need to create a new slide, enter the title of that slide, create another slide, type a line and press tab. But somehow I don’t think that this is the intended or recommended way to do this.

It has been a while since I have posted. Posting on the blog really reminds me that I need to upgrade my server; it’s having a lot of trouble keeping up. Especially since the 5000 comment spams that I received since I installed the filtering. For now I have just plain disabled commenting, I just might turn it back on when I have a new server.

I will soon write a longer update and some interesting stories, but meanwhile have a look at an excellent post: Great Programmers Answer.

On another blogging related note: check out the blogging industry over at the World Series of Poker. There is blogs about this everywhere:

• Pokerstars has a whole team of bloggers,
• Absinthetics contains some updates from a players point of view,
• Pokernews has news about the WSOP in all kinds of languages,
• Cardplayer has the official chipcounts,
• and many many more blogs can be found from links from those sites.

Summary: the main event is well under way, about half of the 8500 players are left and they are playing for a first prize of $12,000,000 dollars.

Since a couple of days my blog has been under attack of comment spam.

Since the beginning of this blog I had some comment spam. At first it was only one or two a week, which wasn’t that much of a problem. I looked into some possibilities to have a user-friendly way of stopping this. I ruled out CAPTCHAs, while these may be “friendly” to users who can see, they are not for the visually impaired, and besides, there are already programs that can do them about just as well as humans.

Then I encountered the Hashcash plugin for Wordpress. It provides the browser with a simple mathematical puzzle, which solved correctly, allows for the comment to be posted. Most browsers can do this without a problem, so that looked to be the solution.

After a while, comments again started to trickle in, first once or twice a week and the last couple of days it became more than 20 a day. I have now installed the (SpamKarma)[http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/] plugin (see the footer of the page), which does some filtering and other smart stuff to figure out if a comment is spam or not, once it has been posted. This (and Wordpress itself) is turning out to be a pretty heavy load for my poor little server, so I might soon have to look into other possibilities.

To have a frame of reference of how fast things are going with the comments, at the time of writing it has caught 117 comment spams. Most of those are from before, which I had either forgot about or were in the archive but not displayed.

Since a few months I have taken up a new hobby, playing Texas Hold’em Poker. I have mostly been playing online, with friends and have been doing so-so for the last 8 months. I’ve won some, and lost some, overall, I’m about equal. I like the game very much, it is a very interesting mix of psychology, statistics and bluffing. While there is some amount of luck involved, you can influence the odds you get, by betting, not betting or simply not taking part in the hand.

I do not aspire to be a professional pokerplayer, I do like to play the occasional game and earn some small money on the side. It is mostly about fun for me, but earning some money with it is nice. So I have been taking it a little bit more seriously, bought some books and of course browsed the Internet for more information.

Then I learned of the freeroll qualifier tournament near where I live. Which I thought would be a very nice opportunity for getting some free live poker experience. The idea is that Everest Poker is organising free qualifying tournaments across Europe, for the Everest Poker European Championship. The finale is in Barcelona with a prize pool of $50,000.

Just on Thursday I received my copies of Harrington on Hold’em volumes I & II. I had heard from some of his concepts before, and quickly started reading to prepare for the tournament. I only managed to get about halfway through the first volume, but I learned a lot from that book.

So I went to the tournament, with some degree of confidence, and set my goal to just enjoy myself. I wanted to learn from the experience of my first live tournament and just play as well as I was able to, meanwhile, trying to observe my opponents and get used to poker-table manners. It turns out that I did a little bit better than that…I managed to win the entire tournament, from 63 other players. The skills of the players varied from some completely clueless, who had not played a hand of Hold’em before, some like me, but also some experienced cash-game and online players. A report on the tournament will be posted on the Everest Poker Blog soon.

I will not turn this blog into a pokerblog, but on occasion I will post some results of how I am doing, results of tournaments, et cetera.

Computers are a constant source of distraction. Staring at your screen, there are lots of little icons, time, menus and others windows, just begging for your attention. On OS X this is thankfully a bit less than on Windows (apps don’t just grab focus when they need your attention, and Growl is also a very unintrusive way to stay updated). But sometimes that still is not enough.

Enter the Semi Fullscreen mode, as suggested by Merlin Mann. Install the following apps:

• MenuShade - dims the menubar, until you put your mouse over it.
• Spirited Away - hides inactive applications after a specified amount of inactivity.
• Backdrop - displays a full screen image or color as a layer between the front applications and the applications beneath it (and the desktop).

Then:

• Turn on dock hiding.
• Launch Backdrop and Spirited Away and put Backdrop in Spirited Away’s exception list.
• Set Backdrop to display a completely black background color.
• Launch MenuShade and make the hidden menubar completely black.
• Start working on the app that you want.

The neat thing is that there are no more distractions. Once you start working on something else, your original work will disappear, triggering you to get back to work again.

I have also created two small scripts to quickly launch and quit these applications, put them somewhere where Quicksilver will find it and you can quickly start and stop the mode.

My Applescripting skills are limited, but I haven’t been able to get the script to automatically close Spirited Away’s startup dialog. Any suggestions?