FOB

I was complaining a while back that I couldn't get my Logitech M-BA47 rodent's fourth button to do anything but be an alternate second button. I went out and bought an Apple Mighty Mouse, which I'm pretty happy with.

While unplugging my Logitech mouse to take it in to work (it was better than the wheel-less thing I had there), I found the culprit. You know those little USB to PS/2 adapter plugs some mice have? Turns out this was one of those. When I plugged the now-USB mouse directly into the USB bus, all of the sudden the fourth button started generating a unique event.

Today's tip: unplug the hardware defunctionalizer.

I recently complained about my troubles in getting my Apple Mighty Mouse to scroll horizontally on my Linux box. It works now! Nothing to it…

At the suggestion of an anonymous commenter, I just bought an Apple Mighty Mouse for my Linux box. $45 (with the academic discount) is a lot of money for a mouse, but it seemed pretty cool. And it is pretty cool—except for the little matter that the horizontal scrolling doesn't work…

I have, inadvertently, plaid a cruel joke upon a friend on the occasion of her birthday. I purchased her a copy of The Firesign Theatre's Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers…

While I was at Microsoft last week, I was using my laptop as my computing platform, and using it pretty much 18 hours per day. After spending a week messing around with the "Trackpad" on my IBM T41, I finally got it to work as designed in the last couple of days. In the meantime, I was using a little mini-wheelmouse as my primary pointing device.

Although I've had a scrollwheel on various of my mice for perhaps 5 years, it's never really been something I used or wanted to use. Now, for some reason, I'm all over it…

I really intended to blog the rest of my Microsoft visit. Somehow, though, it didn't get done. The MS folks kept us busy dawn-to-dusk, and any spare time I had was spent getting work done and catching up with things…

When there's a bug in an open source program, there are something like seven approaches to getting it fixed:

1. Upgrade: it's already been fixed.
2. Find a fix online.
3. Get the source and fix it.
4. Use an official issue-reporting mechanism and wait for a fix.
5. Contact the responsible developer and ask them to fix it.
6. Work around the bug.
7. Flail around asking for help from "the community".

With my OpenOffice.org bug, I have rapidly exhausted the first six options. So…

I'm partway through spending a week at Microsoft for two conferences, "Academic Days on Trustworthy Computing" (ADTC) and the "Microsoft Technology Summit" (MTS)…

A while back, I built a little emacs + shell hack to prepare attachments for MH. The usual borkage applied…

Back in February, I got tired of losing blog posts. I decided it was time to figure out how to post to my Drupal-powered blog site using BlogAPI and a blogging client. I hate GUI text editing, though; I just wanted to use emacs. Josh pointed me at an emacs weblogging client, and off I went…