Morten Liebach

Train Travel Thoughts

2010-07-03T06:12:25+00:00

With Mette Marie and the kids now living in Trige and me in Copenhagen I get to travel a lot back and forth on the week-ends by train, 2-4 week-ends per month.

I like travelling by train, I always enjoy the view. The railroads are always passing through the prettiest parts of the country. Then I sit and let my thoughts drift out into the landscape, picturing myself running and cycling through it on all the cool roads and paths that I see.

As the train travels along the south coast of Vejle fiord I inevitably think back to the, in my mind, legendary Vejle Triathlon. It was the first ¼ Ironman race I did on June 6th 1993, and the first open water race on the Danish triathlon calendar back then. The water was cold, and smelled/tasted of the exhaust from the boats that had been sailing through just before the gun went off. Then on to a completely flat first 10 km of the bike, and then, Bam!, you hit Munkebjerg, one of the nastiest hills in the kingdom. Loved it.

Last I looked, Vejle Triathlon was just a shadow of its former self with a pool swim, shorter distance, and no more munkebjerg.

Back on track, litterally… I especially love that DSB has been running a campaign with free internet on the Copenhagen—Århus route where I travel, but it’s ending in a few days. Sadly.

And today I’m travelling to Holstebro instead, currently between Vejle and Herning, where there’s no internet coverage for the train. I manage. Barely. Just don’t know when I can upload this.

I’ll just enjoy the less familiar views and look forward to spending 29 hours and 45 minutes with my kids. And my mother, sister, nephews and aunt. Will be great.

And just now the train stops at my childhood town of Brande.

Update: Minutes before scheduled arrival in Herning the train stopped and it was announced that there were problems in Herning and the train would return to Brande where a bus woud pick us up. That bus never arrived, instead we got on the next train and arrived about an hour late in Herning, all in all I’ll be just over an hour late in Struer. (Just now passing a part of the Herning Triathlon course…)

Drawing

2010-06-06T19:31:35+00:00

Some guy on the train drew this portrait of me.

I don’t know the artists name, he just drew it, unbeknown to me, while I sat in deep thought looking out the window and listening to The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, their message still depressingly current across 18 years since their first and only album.

I had just had a wonderful week-end with the kids and my family, and when I left and waved good-bye and had walked about 30 meter, my 3½-year old son ran after me shouting “Dad! Wait dad!”, and I had to turn around and bring him back, before I had to leave for the bus I had to catch.

It breaks my heart every time I have to leave, even more this time.

I very much appreciated the gesture of the drawing, the physicality of it, much more than the meager “Thanks!” I gave suggested. I was a little surprised of course. And it made me think about how digital my life has become, and how little I create physical artifacts with my hands. I kind of miss that. I used to draw a lot as a kid, but I stopped in my teens.

Floyd Landis, Doper

2010-05-25T17:48:21+00:00

Floyd Landis has admitted to doping, and in a dramatic break with the omerta of cycling, named names. Names like Armstrong, Leipheimer and Zabriskie. And I believe Landis. And I’m not the least surprised.

Pro cycling is dead to me, morally and ethically bankrupt. What they do is no longer fantastic, that stopped definitively for me when Ivan Basso was busted for doping. Yes, I know he never tested positive or admitted to doing anything wrong, only intent, but I must say I don’t care. He was not the hero I once thought.

I believe you can’t reliably place in the top 10 in the general classification in a grand tour without being a doper.

Pro cycling have a long tradition for doping, and I think you could replace “Floyd Landis” in the title of this post with any other grand tour winner since forever. Only there wasn’t any rules against doping before some time in the early 60’ies of course.

The reason it has become like this is that to get to the top you must live and breathe your sport from a relatively young age, and then after many years you get a lucky break and go pro, and, at least if you’re good, start earning enough money that you can afford the $10k/year + logistics you need for a doping programme like what Floyd Landis was on. Can you say no to living the dream? Because that’s the question you think you’re answering when you are introduced to doping.

I believe some people are smart enough to answer the right question, to say “no” to cheating, because that is what it is about. And that is absolutely wonderful, and I wish to support those people as much as I can, but how do I distinguish them from the dopers?

I can’t, because the doping control is not good enough, and they all say they’re clean, or at least that they “… never tested positive.” And that’s the tragedy.

Addendum: This is not to say that the doping controls should be stricter, I think the whereabouts system is draconian enough as it is. The incentive to cheat should just be removed, and I have absolutely no clue about how to do that.

Barefooting

2010-05-11T20:11:19+00:00

The last month I’ve been runnning “barefoot” in FiveFingers, both KSO and Classic depending on temperature, that I bought from Alun.

I first tried a barefoot approach to running in the form of Pose Running a few years ago because I got injured by my Saucony stability shoes. I later found out it was compartment syndrome in my anterior shin compartment I suffered from. There is “… only one form of effective treatment for this injury, and that is a surgical procedure in which the lining of the tight compartment is split, allowing the mucle to expand freely” according to Noakes pp. 833-834. Good thing I didn’t know that at the time, and set about correcting the underlying biomechanical issues instead.

At first I tried going to 100% Pose Running, cold turkey style, in a pair of Puma H-streets, which of course gave me sore calves like never before. In the beginning it took 5-6 days for the pain to subside, after around 6 weeks it was down to 3 days, and then it didn’t get better. Which was very discouraging. I was saved by the Nike Free 4.0 shoes that had just come out, they proved to be a good compromise.

Later I’ve fallen completely in love with Newton shoes.

In retrospect all my problems came from the misunderstanding that for Pose Running the heel is not supposed to touch the ground at all. This seems to be a common misconception when learning, so let me just say here that my experience is that everything gets better when you start to support your weight on a flat foot in the middle phase of the step. If you’re a fast runner with a very fast turnover—unlike me—you might be able to run more on your forefoot, at least that’s what I think I tend to do when running strides at around 3’30"/km and a cadence of 95 or faster, and also the reason incorporating strides is a great idea in general, year round.

All is not perfect though; this morning when I got out of bed and put weight on my right foot my right calf was very stiff and sore, so much that I had a limp the first 5 minutes. It probably started on April 18th (Ahh, the value of a training log. Intensity kills—or at least injures—in case you were wondering). So I’m back to my current Newtons and had a completely unproblematic run in them this morning.

So I guess I should reintroduce the FiveFingers in a weeks time or so, and then only run half of my runs in them, and none of the longer runs, where longer is defined as anything above 60 minutes or so. And nothing fast, not even strides, for a while.

How I got Into Triathlon

2010-04-14T20:23:21+00:00

I started running in the winter 1991-1992. I had worked for two years as a forest worker but got laid off, and being 20 years old and having to move back home with my mother, waiting for my 6 months of civil service, I gained a lot of weight. I had been used to eat a lot with my previous years of hard physical labour, and all of a sudden I sat around reading or watching TV, with an undimished appetite. I got fat quickly.

Something had to be done. The completely natural choice was of course to become a triatlete. I’ve always loved riding my bike, and I’ve always loved bikes as technology, and to me triathlon bikes are the ultimate in aerodynamics and comfort, all at once. So I wanted one of those bikes, and it would look silly without also doing some swimming and running. And really; how hard could it be?

I already knew very well that running would be my weak link, and to this day it still is. I knew how to swim breaststroke, and I was confident I could do the distance that way, and cycling was no problem whatsoever, I only had to get that cool bike. I only had a very worn down yellow 1989 Nishiki Ariel mountain bike.

So in the autumn of 1991 I started running. I looked at a map and carefully measured the distance with a piece of string to a good point that would be approximately 2 km from home. Then I ran out there, turned around and ran home. Lather, rinse, repeat. I tried to run 6 days per week, but most weeks I’d have one or two days where I was too tired. I didn’t just run easy of course, I tried to set a new personal best almost every time, timing my runs by taking note of the exact time on my watch when I started and stopped. I was the quintessential boneheaded beginner.

I think I made it down to about 22-23 minutes on that approximately 4 km course, going as fast as I could.

Over that winter I trained reasonably well, although I was frequently plagued by shin splints. I came into contact with a local bike shop (HeMeBa in Thisted, I later worked there a little) where I gradually bought the parts for my bike. The wheels, gears, brakes and crankset I got from a Specialized Transition, the severely pink model they made that year. It was Shimano 105 with Wolber Aero something-22 rims (remember Wolber?). Late in the winter I got a 54 cm Principia 700 frame, a red aluminium frame with standard road geometry. I think they also made a model named 650 after the wheel size, 650C, with a more appropriate geometry for triathlon, but I guess I thought that since I had a perfectly fine 700C set of wheels I’d just buy a standard road frame and set it up with a forward pointing seatpost, that’d be the same, right? (Wrong, of course, but I didn’t know better back then).

I don’t think I had rounded 100 km on my awesome neon yellow Avocet 40 computer, with cadence, before I did my first multisport event. It was the national championship in duathlon 1992 in Silkeborg on the old 5-30-5 distance.

That is still the most windy race I’ve ever done, noone were on race wheels, rims deeper than 30-40 mm were dangerously hard to control on that day. When you rode along and looked to the horizon it was just a brown haze from all the soil being blown up from the still bare fields, and it got in everywhere, you could see and taste it in the cups in the water handed out. The runs were evil too, about 2 km slightly downhill, 1 km flat, then 2 km slightly uphill. A nasty one the second time around. But I made it through, and I was very proud of that. Can’t remember the time anymore, but think I still have the diploma somewhere.

I think I have only once since tried riding my bike in stronger wind, years later, on a day where I had a 45 minute time trial scheduled, so I did that going flat out against the wind — struggling to do 20 km/h. Then I turned around and was home in 20 minutes doing 50 km/h with absolutely no effort…

I did 3 other races that year, all of them the then popular ⅙ ironman distance, 650 m swim, 30 km bike and 7 km run. I still think that’s a perfect distance, although the swim could be longer. The second of those races were in Aalborg with a open fresh-water swim, and I was a very weak breaststroker at about 17 minutes for 650 m, and suddenly in deep water with less bouyancy than I was used to I almost paniced and swam to a boat and quit the race. I claimed I’d been accidentally kicked in the stomach by another swimmer, just to save face. There was another swimmer with a similar story in that boat, although he was probably not lying. It turned out to be Bent Nielsen, the race organizer of the ironman distance race in Rødekro that I would end up doing 2 years later.

I was nonetheless completely hooked on triathlon by then, I really liked it, except for the humiliation of spending the last third of the swim alone in the pool; something had to be done.

I lived and studied in Thisted by then, and they had a really good swim team with some world cup swimmers among them, so I went and looked at their practice and after having done that a few times I pulled myself together and went and talked to the coach, Bjarne Kragh. I told him I was a triathlete swimming breaststroke, and wanted to learn freestyle. What I didn’t know was that Bjarne was himself interested in triathlon and wanted to try it, and that was probably a huge reason he agreed to take me on and teach me.

So that autumn I started swimming 4 times per week, sometimes even 5, with all the 11-14 year old kids. All of them of course real swimmers doing freestyle like they’d been swimming for many years. And they probably had.

Swimming became my focus, almost never missing practice. I didn’t really do much other training that winter except for the occasional run and even more occasional ride on the rare days with exceptional weather.

Bjarne had me swimming alone in a lane while I learned freestyle; he’d give me something to work on and then occasionally check up on me and help me when he could while doing his real job with the rest of the squad. In that environment I learned quickly, and I loved it. The kids would always be faster than me in the just over two years I trained with their squad, but especially in the beginning I closed the gap quickly, and that was tremendously satisfying. Especially when I started to do the same sets they did.

I am still incredibly thankful for the help Bjarne gave me, I’d never become a reasonable freestyler without him. I later trained with Bjarne, and one time when the pool was closed for a few days for a holiday Bjarne, Thomas (another local triathlete who also helped me with training programs) and I exploited the fact that Bjarne had the keys and went swimming. I jumped in first in a completely quiet pool without lane ropes or anything. As I streamlined off the wall, just ahead of the waves I’d made, I looked forward seeing a perfectly symmetric underwater world, the bottom of the pool perfectly mirrored in the still surface of the water. A completely unexpected beautiful sight. That memory is still vivid in my mind. It only lasted for a few seconds until Bjarne and Thomas jumped in.

I started the 1993 season with the ⅙ ironman distance race in Billund that I’d done the year before as my first triathlon, and I almost halved my swim time from around 17 minutes the year before, to something like 9’35" or so, I also went way too hard, but I was learning. I was so happy, from one of the slowest to one of the faster swimmers in a year. My bike form was about the same as the year before, but my run was improving too.

That race set the tone for the rest of my triathlon “career”, I swam well, biked very well without having to train much for it, and then everybody would ran past me on the run no matter what I did.

I still haven’t really figured out how to run as relatively fast as my swim & bike used to be, but I have figured out how to run almost daily now, without injuries, and that will no doubt prove extremely valuable as I get back into it.

OLPC vs. iPad

2010-04-03T22:03:24+00:00

See how kids use them:

Isaac (4yo) using the XO laptop from Cameron Moll on Vimeo.

iPad first day, used by 9 & 4 year-olds from Cameron Moll on Vimeo.

I hadn’t seen the OLPC interface in action before. Looks terrible, especially in comparison to an iPad. Of course there’s a huge difference in price, scope etc., but still…

OLPC = frustration. iPad = fun.

Source: twitter.com/cameronmoll/status/11548910730

Snoop on Your Laptop's Whereabouts

2010-04-03T21:28:57+00:00

I have my laptop set up to request a specific URL on my server every 15 minutes, so I can follow it’s whereabouts if it happens to get stolen. Or just for statistics.

The idea is not mine, I got it from a Daniel Klein keynote at an Open Source Days keynote a few years ago.

To do this you need a laptop running some sort of Unix based operating system with cron running, and a webserver somewhere else. Preferably one that you control completely like a Linode VPS.

Set up a cronjob on your laptop that periodically fetch a URL (lines wrapped, should be one long line):

*/15 * * * * curl --silent --connect-timeout 10 --max-time 20
  --user-agent '<host> cron snoop'
  "http://snoop.example.com/<host>?h=$(hostname);ip=$(ifconfig
  | egrep -A 5 '^en' | fgrep 'inet ' | awk '{print $2}')" 2>&1 > /dev/null

Adjust the exact URL as per what you have available, and substitute the computer’s hostname with the <host> string. The above is specific for Mac OS X, but most Linux distributions will have curl available as a package if it’s not installed by default; I know all the BSD's have it in ports/pkgsrc.

Use ‘crontab -e’ to edit your crontab, except on Mac OS X, where you must create a file, eg. ~/.crontab, with the line above, and then run crontab < ~/.crontab. Annoying, but it’s been like this forever, so I suppose Apple think it’s a feature. (Yes, I have submitted a bug report).

I’ve set up a virtual host on my server specifically for tracking like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /var/www/snoop.example.com/
    ServerName snoop.example.com
    ServerAdmin webmaster@example.com
    DirectoryIndex index.html
    ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/snoop_error_log
    CustomLog /var/log/httpd/snoop_log combined
    <Directory "/var/www/snoop.example.com">
        Options None
        AllowOverride None
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Then I created an empty /var/www/snoop.example.com/<host> file, just to avoid filling the log with 404's.

Now you can find lines like this in /var/log/httpd/snoop_log (lines wrapped):

1.2.3.4 - - [03/Apr/2010:19:30:00 +0000]
  "GET /?h=<host>.example.com;ip=192.168.2.23 HTTP/1.1"
  200 - "-" "<host> cron snoop"

Quite informative.

Domain Renewal Group

2010-03-29T14:56:07+00:00

I came home from work today and found this nice little piece of snail mail spam, or a “Domain Name Expiration Notice” as Domain Renewal Group call it, in my mailbox:

They offer, as a courtesy of course, to take care of the goodnightr.com domain for me for only a whopping €28 for a year. Thanks but no thanks.

Noone should pay that much for a .com domain name, I currently pay less than half of that at gratisdns.dk, so even if you would save money transfering your domain name to Domain Renewal Group, you could save much more transfering to someone else.

So just say no to Domain Renewal Group.

92 Specialized Transition Pro

2010-03-17T18:56:12+00:00

Someone mercifully scanned and uploaded the 1992 Specialized catalogue. I vividly remember seeing that catalogue and the Transition Pro model (page 26). The link is to the German language version of the catalogue, the one I remember is the english version, which had a centerfold of a fit looking babe on a Transition Pro who looked like she’d spent an inordinate amount of hours in the saddle.

It was my first year of triathlon, and I loved how cool that bike looked. I still think it looks great, especially the wheels. Nowadays they’re called HED H3, and they still rock, their shape completely unchanged since then as far as I know, only the finish and decals have changed. I can’t think of any other kind of aero equipment with that sort of longevity.

The frame was a pretty normal looking Cr-Mo frame, probably True Temper tubes, with a very modern 78º seat tube angle and aluminium fork. I tried a Specialized Allez steel bike back then; it was extremely comfortable and well behaved, an experience I’ve always had with quality steel bikes, but to this day I haven’t owned one myself, and I probably should.

Even those 1992 Specialized aerobars look oddly modern with their s-bend shape. Bear in mind that back in those days all other aerobars had a roughly 35º-50º ski-bend.

The gear levers are standard downtube levers mounted on an adapter on the aerobar so they’re right next to your hands instead of out in front like bar-end levers. Syntace still makes something like that, along with Profile. I used the Syntace model for a season or two with a C2 aerobar, and I still think it’s the best placement for gear levers on aerobars. Syntace really should make their aeroshifter compatible with the C3 for a ergonomically perfect setup in my opinion.

To this day I still think a round-tubed steel or titanium frame with those 3-spoke wheels and an aerobar look at least as cool as a Cervélo P3 does. Preferably with pursuit type base bar instead of the drop bars, but otherwise essentially like the old 1992 Specialized Transition Pro.

VDSL Goodness

2010-03-15T07:29:21+00:00

Just got my new Fullrate 25/8 mbit VDSL set up:

Ping times are good too:

Campagnolo Bar-end Shifters

2010-03-07T10:17:06+00:00

The current Campagnolo bar-end shifters looks like something out of the 90’s, because they are. They literally haven’t updated their design for more than a decade, not even to their 11-speed standard that they converted to in 2008. It’s atrocious, and I really think they’re missing a solid chunk of the triathlon market on that.

The only way to run 11-speed Campagnolo casettes with bar-end shifters is by using non-indexed friction shifters (both Shimano’s and, as far as I know, Campagnolo’s own can do this), just like the 80’s where I got my first race bike with down-tube shifters and SunTour components. Ah, nostalgia… I could get used to that again, possibly even enjoy it, but I don’t think people who learned to ride race bikes within the last 15 years would feel the same.

So I sent this email to Campagnolo:

Dear Brilliant "Campagnolo (The official Campagnolo web site)":http://www.campagnolo.com/ Engineers

Please make bar-end shifters compatible with your 11-speed groupsets, it's very important to us triathletes, because triathlon is not just like bike time trials. We really need low gears to get through to the run in good shape (and an 11-speed cassette helps here), and because we're just not as bike fit and with the same top-end as our bike racing specialist brethren.

I think you're missing a significant market by not having such shifters available.

Roughly 2 million bonus point if you come up with something as elegant and ergonomic as the SRAM R2C and Zipp VukaR2C levers. Maybe even license the R2C system, although I can understand if you think you can do better.

I have an original full-size Campagnolo wine-bottle opener, and it's amazingly brilliant in its simplicity and function, I drink more wine just because I enjoy using it; apply that kind of thinking to triathlon/time-trial bar-end shifters and world domination on all better triathlon bikes is assured.

Or maybe you're betting on your electronic shifting system (long time no see, cancelled?). Please don't, because I'm pretty sure that'll be priced outside my and many other triathletes' range.

Yours truly
Morten Liebach

Oh, and by the way, if you feel like writing Campagnolo and telling them something like the above, please don’t hesitate, but be aware the the contact page require you to fill in a “state”, but it’s greyed out when you select Denmark as country because we don’t have states (duh!), so I lied and claimed to be from Hawaii. Stupid little validation error. I’ve alerted them to that too.

Divorced

2010-03-06T23:29:10+00:00

On 2010-01-02 around 10:30, after having talked to my wife on the phone while she was on her way back home, I realized my love for her was gone. It was the emotional equivalent of a baseball bat to the head, and I spent the next while lying curled up on he floor crying, then another hour staring out the window completely and utterly lost.

There had been signs months—perhaps even years—earlier, but as always, you live life forwards, but understand it backwards. That’s how such big things can suddenly hit you apparently out of the blue.

My love was broken beyond repair, though I—and we—tried very hard to fix it. January was the hardest month of my life. I landed a new job in that period after having gone unemployed for 74 days, and I’d normally be ecstatic about that, but instead I just felt relieved that I’d get to be away from home a good 40 hours a week.

So we decided on a divorce, or more precisely, getting separated. We’ve sent in the paperwork, and last week-end Mette Marie and the kids moved to Trige. Saying goodbye to the kids was absolutely heartbreaking.

We now have a very nice apartment for sale, 200 m from Islands Brygge metro station, a little further to the IT University and the national radio concert hall and less than 2 km from Copenhagen city hall. And I have enjoyed that I could go for a run and within 2 minutes be on paths on Amager Fælled that can last for up to 10 km runs without being repetitive. We’ve been privileged living in such a great place, and we’re going to miss it.

Oh, and I’m looking for an apartment to rent for when we get this one sold.

I was at Open Source Days 2010 today, and met a lot of my normally online friends in real life, which is always great, but had to talk about the divorce. It was tough, but you were all sorry and understanding and everything. Thanks. It helped me tremendously to just talk about it, getting it out in the open. I feel a lump in my throat just writing this. Better stop now.

I think this is what I’ll write about the divorce here. Deliberately kept short (kind of, I’d originally envisioned something half the length), because I could go on for a long time about a billion things, but it’s private, painful and, I think, bad form to do so.

Thanks for reading.

My Current Mail Setup

2010-03-01T12:20:51+00:00

I have all my domains set up on my Google Apps Premier account. That way I get to use the great Google spam mail filters and I don’t have to run and maintain my own mail server and spam filters, which is definitely nice, I can play with that sort of thing at work instead.

When I’m on my laptop I almost always use Mail.app, but on all other computers I use the web interface.

All mail filtering is done serverside by Google, all Gmail tags appear as folders in Mail.app, and I keep as much logic on the serverside as possible, storing everything serverside, never deleting anything.

The “All Mail” mailbox is then used as trash by selecting the mailbox in the mailboxes pane, clicking “Mailbox” → “Use This Mailbox For” → select “Trash”. This makes deleting a mail in Mail.app equivalent to archiving it (‘e’ with keyboard shortcuts enabled) in the web interface. One problem though; I just discovered that Mail.app no longer displays the “All Mail” folder on Snow Leopard. Maybe that happened in the upgrade from Leopard… let me know if you know.

In addition I set up Gmail filters so that mailinglist email gets tagged with the list name and then archived straight away, so I never see them directly in my inbox, only when I dive into the appropriate folder. This way the mail that appear when I open Mail.app is something I have to read and process, and I either do this straight away and then delete it (archive), or I flag it (⇧⌘L) to return to it later, as this is much easier than using an “Action” folder like the inbox zero system prescribes. I really hate moving mail between folders manually, it’s a high cost operation.

And that’s it, that’s how I handle mail. Simple and efficient.

I like the paid version of Google Apps for the lack of advertising and extra features. It was a pleasant surprise when I found out that you could have as many domains as you wanted on the same Google Apps account, the only limitation being that you’re not given complete liberty at administering mailboxnames acrosss all domains, meaning that if you have the ‘asdf’ mailbox on one domain, you have it on all of the other domains too. No problem in real life though.

Make Love not Porn

2010-02-15T17:03:03+00:00

From the TED blog:

Cindy Gallop use the talk to launch Make Love not Porn, which looks great. See also “Porn” Among Top Search Terms for Kids:

In a somewhat worrying piece of news, security firm Symantec has released the top search terms by kids in 2009. Topping the lists: “YouTube,” “Google,” “Facebook,” “sex” and “porn.”

Interesting data.

Get Rid of CapsLock

2010-01-17T12:02:22+00:00

There are no more useless key on a keyboard than CapsLock. I always map it to Control instead, that’s far more useful. This is a little reminder to myself on how to do it. Because I always forget.

Mac OS X

Open System Preferences, click on Keyboard and select the Keyboard tab. Click on the “Modifier Keys…” button in the lower right corner, and then set Caps Lock to whatever you want. I think you should want Control.

FreeBSD

Save the code below as /usr/local/etc/hal/fdi/policy/x11-input.fdi, and make sure you have hald(8) running (hald_enable="YES" in /etc/rc.conf).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!-- Save as /usr/local/etc/hal/fdi/policy/x11-input.fdi on FreeBSD -->
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <!-- Allow Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill the X server.
      This is the old default behavior, which I prefer. -->
    <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keyboard">
      <merge key="input.x11_options.XkbOptions" type="string">
        terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp
      </merge>
    </match>
    <!-- Map CapsLock to Control. Can't be done in xorg.conf anymore. 
      From http://blog.zomgepix.org/2009/06/death-to-caps-lock.html -->
    <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keyboard">
      <merge key="input.x11_options.XkbOptions" type="string">
        ctrl:nocaps
      </merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

Sometimes hald(8) can be hard to kill completely, so reboot to make sure it works.

I found this tip on the zomg epix!!1 blog.

Windows

Paste the code below into a file ending in .reg and double-click it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,1d,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

Then reboot.

Enjoy!