KODA

Bought a shiny new mouse today: the wireless optical Logitech LX7. Everything worked great out of box, until at around 11:30pm I decided to google around to see how to configure the tilt-wheel and back and forward buttons to work in Linux.

Big mistake.

It’s now 1:35am, and I finally have my solution. The trick is to use the evdev X.org input driver, as for some reason the mouse driver can’t handle all of my buttons. I followed sections 1 and 2 of this howto for the general idea of setting up evdev.

The problem is, none of the howtos I dug up really worked. Things sort of worked, but there seemed to be confusion about the number of buttons (xmodmap reported 9, while xev dumped events from up to #12). Also, the tilt wheel mapping seemed to be reversed. At this point, I began to suspect something was going awry, so I started looking over /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Here’s what I found:

Over the past few days I’ve become hopelessly addicted to the game Tremulous, ever since reading about it on NewsForge. While I originally thought of the NewsForge author’s opinion of Tremulous as “The best free software game ever” seemed a bit excessive, after trying it out and getting into the game, I have to agree. This is a seriously great game.

What piqued my interest was the fact that it was based on the Quake 3 engine, GPL’d, and would run on Linux. After downloading it and
giving it a spin, I must say I was shocked I had never heard of it before. It is possible that this is because the standalone 1.1.0 version was released less than 4 months ago, though with the quality and polish of this game, I would have expected to be seeing and hearing about it all over. The game looks and feels fantastic, and all of the graphics and user interfaces are very professionally designed. I really love the concepts of the buildings and units as well as the creativity shown in the popular maps, with tons of interesting and well-themed nooks and crannies. Tremulous also has a unique fast-paced mixture of Real Time Strategy and First-Person Shooter gameplay, which makes it fun but also strategically interesting.

Today was spent experimenting with something I’ve intended to for a long time: PHP and AJAX. I finally bit the bullet and started learning it in earnest.

This morning was spent searching for a suitable PHP toolkit to tinker with. The one I finally arrived at is the SAJAX toolkit, a moderately minimal framework for creating simple callbacks and recievers without having to go through the nitty-gritty of the lower-level XMLHttpRequest APIs. After playing around with it for a while, I really like it. There are some things that are quite confusing to me as a first time user, such as the asynchronous nature of things and the effects on variable scope – but all in all it’s quite a nice system to play with.

I also discovered a quite wonderful little Firefox extension called FireBug. It has to be the most clean and cleverly put together all-purpose debugger I’ve ever seen. It’s very beautifully designed, too. It looks to be extremely useful in debugging javascript, css, and xhtml source in the future. It sure helped me out debugging XMLHttpRequests today!

Hmm, looks like something borked samba printing (and it’s respective smbspool) in Ubuntu Dapper over the past month or so. I just noticed my print attempts were failing last week, only to discover this ongoing discussion over in the Ubuntu bug tracker. There are some packages purported to contain the fix, too. [update: this fix does indeed work here]

Looks like they’re well aware of the problem… but really, a very similar has issue occurred before, only a few months ago.

I suppose that’s what you get for running beta distributions…

Sorry things have been pretty quiet here for the past day or so… I’ve been busy writing papers and other fun school-related stuff.

Well, I do have one announcement, and that is that I’ve finally found a PHP gallery app that fit my criteria, and that app is the excellent ZenPhoto. It’s just complex enough for my tastes, while being lightweight and having some neat ajaxy admin features. Not much to show yet, though it’s looking very good. I’m busy theming and tweaking things to fit the dark look of chromakode.com, though there are a few buggy things going on in the CSS that I haven’t figured out yet. Here’s a little preview, if you’d like to see what I’m talking about. There’s some old pictures up there for testing, though other than that it’s pretty bare. I’d love to hear any comments on the design, though (bugs aside).

A while ago, I wrote a howto, “Compiz, XGL on Ubuntu for the morbidly lazy,” about installing Compiz on a standard Ubuntu Dapper setup. This worked great for the packaged 0.0.2 version in the Dapper repositories, but while Ubuntu started freezing and preparing for their release, Compiz development blazed ahead and many beautiful new features and improvements came with it. Because of this, I switched over to the cvs version of Compiz and ran it for a long time. Unfortunately, my love of the bleeding-edge caught up to me, as about a month ago it seems that Ubuntu’s also not-updated version of Xgl and the Mesa libraries fell out of compatibility with cvs Compiz.

After several unsuccessful attempts to revert to an older version, I resigned back to normal Metacity until I had the time to look deeper into the problem and find what changes were needed. Long story short, after coming back to it today, I stumbled upon the excellent compiz.net forums, and subsequently RacerII’s howto. RacerII points to another forum member reggaemanu’s (mostly undocumented) repository over at xgl.compiz.info, which contains patched Xgl and Mesa packages. I tried them out today, and they work like a charm!