whoControl? uControl.

I upgraded from OS X 10.3.7 to 10.3.8 on Thursday night. Everything seemed to be working smoothly until I discovered that my Caps Lock key was working.

Let me explain.

The Caps Lock key toggles whether you type in lowercase or ALL CAPS. Using a long string of all capital letters might have been the fashion back when the cutting edge of communication was tapping out dits and dots over a wire owned by Western Union, but in the 21st century lowercase is the standard. I, for example, only ever use a Caps Lock key when doing PBX maintenance.

So the Caps Lock key on my iBook is worthless. Worse yet, the iBook keyboard has exactly one Control key. Those of you with any UNIX background whatsoever understand the importance of the Control key in the most basic actions: move to beginning of line, move to end of line, delete a character, backspace a character, backspace a whole word.

Having one Control key isn't the end of the world. Having one Control key and having it in a shitty position on the keyboard is. As luck would have it, Apple has decided to put their Control key in the pissiest of the piss-poor positions possible.

Ugh. If only there was a way to solve both of these problems at the same time: turn the Caps Lock key into some useful keyboard real estate and find a way to move the Control key out from underneath my left ring finger.

There appear to be a couple ways to do this, but the way I prefer most is uControl. uControl runs a kernel extension that, among other things, turns your Caps Lock into a Control key. The GUI is rather cryptic, but it works so well that you have the luxury to set it once and forget it.

And uControl works so well that I routinely forget about it altogether. People have asked me what software I recommend for use with OS X, and I always neglect to mention uControl because it's just so important to me. You don't think about it anymore. If someone asks me what kind of computer they should buy, I don't even think to say "it should definitely have some kind of power supply". It's just a given. It is something so critical that to mention it is pedantic, so reliable that you may neglect it repeatedly.

Well, uControl worked when I upgraded from 10.3.5 to 10.3.6 and again to 10.3.7. But 10.3.8 broke it. And it was like being spurned by a lover. "What's wrong, iBook? What did I do to compel you to hurt me like this? I'm getting 'CD' instead of '^C^D'. That's just not right, iBook. How can I make it better?"

There's a one-line fix for uControl that I found by following the directions listed on uControl's Sourceforge bug report forum. It's the post that begins with the string "For those who need extra help". Don't be proud: the instructions are very simple, but if you're the type who insists on an incrementally-numbered step-by-step procedure, here it is.

I patched uControl 1.4.4 last night, and it works marvelously again. This morning while preparing this entry, I discovered that they'd updated 1.4.6 to coincide new features with a fix for this problem for those who get hives typing "sudo make install".

(I did helpdesk for a woman a few weeks ago who for the life of her could not understand that I needed to run an application called "Terminal" on her Powerbook. The laptop was configured for a foreign language, so I couldn't really decipher the names of the things I was seeing in the Applications folder. She kept looking for it in System Preferences, despite my insistence that it wouldn't be there. Turns out it was in the Utilities folder, right where I suspected it would be, language notwithstanding. The Utilities folder was cryptically labeled something like "Finn del Buugatten de los Rhindinkaaner pyjamios liptum frescore". I swear that what I saw was not a word in any language. You think I couldn't have found "utiliten" or "ekstro programmedad" by myself?)

So now I think I'll take my lunch and try to replace uControl 1.4.4 with version 1.4.6. It's an unfathomably important piece of software to use when you run Terminal all the time like I do.