Day 3 in the CAPSoff Campaign

Today we launched our web site - CAPSoff.org. It's a wiki site, which means we'll build it as we go along. The beautiful logo was made yesterday by paulgb. If you also want to join, register at wikidot.com and join the CAPSoff site. As we say in Scots (mae mums's Sco'ish, 'lo mum!), "mony a mickle maks a muckle", which roughly translates to "wikis are fun because everyone lends a hand."

CAPSoff got a lot of press, most of it curious. Heise, a German daily, explained that "Caps Lock werde ohnehin nur von Scammern und Fortran-Programmierern benutzt", which gives me an idea for the propaganda war that will have to be part of this campaign. "Caps Lock is for scammers and Fortran programmers! Are you a scammer? Are you a Fortran programmer? No? Well, prove it and join CAPSoff now!" At least one Nigerian complained that other countries also had decent sized 419 industries. It so happens I spent a lot of time in Nigeria, and it's one of my favourite countries. I didn't get out much past Lagos, the capital, a great place where I had many friends - chaotic, noisy, full of strange and interesting people. Much like the CAPSoff group, I guess.

CAPSoff got discussed on many, many blog comments. There seem to be several opinions.

First, some people think this campaign is petty (the word comes from the French 'petit', meaning small) and a waste of time (the word comes from the herb 'thyme' and means something good to put on pizza). For example, brwyatt asks (on the CAPSoff group):

Speaking about "polution" why couldn't you fight that instead? Global warming, suffocation? I think that is a much more important issue that the existance of a key that some people use and some people don't....

To be honest, I fight suffocation regularly, by holding to a steady breathing pattern. Done this all my life, and it works wonders. Pollution? Well, I walk to work, and ride a bike, and only drive when it's raining or I have to go far. But this is not about me; this is not some one-man crusade against sanity (as Monty Python might say). This is about taking control over the keyboard, our main doorway to the online world. This is about fixing a problem - however small - that has been there since IBM decided we needed a super-shift key so that people could easily enter uppercase into their mainframe apps.

Besides... life is full of battles, big ones and small ones. I'm involved in many noble causes. I've got karma to burn. If CAPSoff really smells like a small ten-topping pizza with extra cheese, well, I don't see that as a bad thing.

Next, there is a definite "don't touch our farkin' caps lock" tendency from the gaming community. Eggeneon says,

Counterstrike - One of, if not THE most played online-game ever. People who play this game have to (like 100's of millions) communicate. Everybody, and I mean everybody, use Ventrilo, a team-speak-program. (www.ventrilo.com) To speak in your mic you must push the caps lock button! It's VITAL FOR MILLIONS! If caps lock was gone, then gamers would find a a hard way to play, because caps lock is the button of choice. It goes extremely well to the rest of the controllers in the settings. DONT YOU DIE

Well, this comment raises two questions. What do you mean by "DONT YOU DIE"?, and more importantly, would you not prefer a special button marked 'Mic'? I mean, seriously, if the best use you can claim for the Caps Lock button is "push to speak", then you are making my argument for me.

Last, there is the hardcore programmer community. It seems that some zombie programming languages still insist on everything being typed in 6-bit compatible uppercase. I can't argue with the facts. I am also (I confess) a hardcore programmer, and spent many wasted years typing hundreds of thousands of lines of COBOL, all in uppercase. I once wrote a complete editor (in COBOL) just so that I could type my programs in lower case and have the software do the work for me. Now, listen, hardcore programmers. If you really, really need to use dinosaur languages that think lowercase characters are a dangerous innovation, and you really, really can't get your hardcore programmer skills together long enough to write some macros or editors that will convert (wait for it...) an 'a' to an 'A'... well, at this point my sarcasm fails me. Look, there are hundreds of millions of dinosaur keyboards out there, a lifetime supply in every conceivable colour and format. Stop complaining. No-one is going to ban your use of Caps Lock. What you do behind closed doors is entirely your business. You can keep your COBOL and SQL and uppercase comments.

What we want is that new keyboards are designed to take into account that the world has changed since 1984, and we're starting by attacking that most villanous of relics, that confuser of innocents, that comforter of scammers and Fortran programmers, the Caps Lock key.