Tag: Open Source

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Personal Reflections Technology

MozillaCamp Delhi

mozillacampdelhi-logo

India’s first ever unconference for Mozilla Firefox users – MozillaCamp Delhi – will be taking place on 10th February 2009. The venue has not been finalised yet, and a lot of work remains to be done with just a week to go for the event, but hey – it’s an unconference! Chip in with your contributions and join the discussion on the MozillaCamp Delhi Google Group. Check up on the stuff that needs to be done and pitch in. I cleaned up the wiki / registration page a bit.

The event will be getting coverage from media outlets CNN-IBN and NDTV 24×7. (I hope they don’t send Hark! DaButt.) Big People from Mozilla like Seth Bindernagel (director of localization) and Arun Ranganathan (standards evangelist) will be attending.

If we can convince the venue hosts, maybe we can haul in a few vats of lava into which we can throw the Unbelievers, as a part of post-(un)conference celebrations. Let the Cleansing begin!

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Technology

Enabling Sticky Keys in Ubuntu

Support for Sticky Keys in Ubuntu has been quite sketchy for the past few releases. For the uninitiated, Sticky Keys allows you to hit the Ctrl / Shift keys with their letter combination without having to press them down together. (This is available in Windows too; hit Shift key five times in a row to bring up the necessary dialog box.)

I prefer to use Sticky Keys a lot. It makes typing faster and more accurate (when it comes to capitalization). That’s why I’m kinda partial to KDE-based distros: apart from the interface with lots of eye-candy, KDE’s implementation of accessibility features works. This is not true with GNOME, where there seems to be a bug in at-spi (the Assistive Technology Service Provider). I’ve already filed a bug report for this issue in Launchpad for Ubuntu. For a distro which keeps a separate page on accessibility (shows the Sticky Kets feature there too), it is ironic that this bug has remained for such a long time at ‘Low’ priority.

Anyway, a few days back I figured out how to fix this problem. I was browsing through keys in gconf-editor when I came across the accessibility-related values. Here’s how you can enable Sticky Keys in Ubuntu.

  1. Go to System Tools > Configuration Editor. If it is not enabled, you may need to edit your Main Menu to show this item by going to System > Preferences > Main Menu and doing the necessary edits. You can also launch gconf-editor using the terminal.
  2. In Configuration Editor, go to /desktop/gnome/accessibility/keyboard. Check the box stickykeys_enable. Uncheck the boxes next to stickykeys_modifier_beep and stickykeys_two_key_off. (It’s the second one which you MUST turn off.) Do this step before the next. (Don’t change the order.) If timeout_enable is checked, uncheck it.
  3. Double-click on the timeout field value and change it to some high value like 7200.
  4. Close Configuration Editor without making any more edits. If you change any other value, or open gconf-editor any day later then note that your ‘timeout’ value will be reset to default of 120 seconds.

Methinks the issue (of Sticky Keys) getting switched off every once in a while is because the stickykeys_two_key_off value is enabled even when it has been disabled from Preferences > Keyboard. Moreover, the reset of timeout value is also not expected behavior and is probably a bug too.

Hope this solves the issues for anyone else who wants to use Sticky Keys in Ubuntu (or any other GNOME-using distro)!