Mattias’ bits and bytes

OS X: Switching current language using the keyboard only

October 12, 2008 @ 17:39

Do you find yourself switching between different languages several times a day? I myself switch between English and Swedish on daily basis, when writing mails, coding etc. Since I use OS X, I try to use the built in dictionary so that I avoid misspellings.

So, how do you go about to change the dictionary currently in use? Simply invoke the Edit menu item, and then find Spelling and Grammar. In its submenu, invoke Show Spelling and Grammar (for those of you who prefer to use the keyboard, just press Cmd + :). A floating window appears, but note that it does not have focus. Neither can you give it focus by invoking Expose, or by flipping through the active application’s windows. Your only choice left… the mouse?

No, you can actually perform one more nifty trick with your keyboard. In System Preferences, under Keyboard & Mouse you’ll find Keyboard Shorcuts. In there, look for Move focus to the floating window. By default, it has a keyboard shortcut of Ctrl + F6. Try invoking it and you’ll se that the current application’s floating window will gain focus.

So, to switch the current language used by the dictionary:

• Open up Spelling and Grammar by pressing Cmd + :
• Give it focus by pressing Ctrl + F6
• Tab around in the window to change the parameters you like

Web site passwords and you

September 21, 2008 @ 17:21

Since many of my friends have been talking about ping.fm in positive words, I decided to sign up for an account earlier today. The signup process was smooth, but the actual setup wasn’t - I might be naive, but I didn’t expect them to ask me for my passwords for all those other services I wanted to ping. I’d rather not give out any password, an opinion I share with e.g. Jeff Atwood. While considering if I should make an exception in this case, I decided to change passwords for a few web services I use from time to time.

Now, changing a password really shouldn’t be a complex thing to do, but many sites still do their best to make this simple task a real p**n in the ass. Some might give incomplete restrictions (“You may use this and that”, where this and that turns out to be an incomplete set of rules when you try to update the password) while others prevent you from choosing a secure password at all (“You may only use the letters a-z, max eight (8) characters”). Below are two of my favorites from today’s futile attempt to change passwords…

Germanwings: “8 characters, 2 digits, no special chars!”

Ok. That won’t make a very secure password. And as a special bonus; non-ascii characters are not allowed in any field in the form on the account page. This is tricky since my street address contains the letter å. And when you thought it couldn’t get worse… it turns out that you cannot log out from the site (well, you could by restarting the browser but that really isn’t gonna happen).

Telenor Mina sidor (translated from Swedish into English): “Your new password may only contain the following characters; A-z, a-z and 0-9.”

OK… that sucks, but I guess I can always replace some of the characters in the new password. Attempting to submit again, with fixes that passes the failed attempt one.

“Your new password contains too many characters! The maximum number allowed is 15”.
Argh… Why couldn’t you just say this from the beginning?

But there’s hope! LinkedIn gets things right and presents me with the following caption above the password field; “Passwords are case-sensitive and must be at least 6 characters. A good password should contain a mix of capital and lower-case letters, numbers and symbols”. That wasn’t that hard, was it? Now go learn from LinkedIn, all you other FAIL services.