Objective C is weird

I’ve been spending some time working on making Open MPI utilize Apple’s XGrid technology for process startup and the like. In the end, the difficult parts turned out to be the fact that the XGrid framework is not particularily well documented and that I don’t know Objective C. That’s right – The XGrid interface is in Objective C, so I had to write the xgrid process starter component for Open MPI in Objective C. Which has the nice side-effect of us now being able to say that we have a component written in a language other than C (if only just barely – ObjC is just barely not C). Anyway, very interesting stuff, and I got to learn all about the NSRunLoop. Yippie.

Caps Lock Goodness

In Tiger, Apple added the ability to swap caps lock and cntl keys from the Keyboard and Mouse preferences pane. There’s a button under keyboard labeled Modifier Keys – you can set what modifier is set by which key. Worked like a champ on on my TiBook. As with uControl, however, the light for the caps lock key would still alter for every press of the caps lock key. Not a big deal, but kind of annoying. On Laura’s brand new, shiny AlBook, the light only switches when the key mapped as the caps lock key changes (which doesn’t have to be the caps key, obviously). Finally, Apple fixed the annoying caps lock key on their Power Books.