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:

After neglecting my bike for a few seasons, I decided to take a look at it over the last few days. Bad idea. Apparently from my neglect, I’ve got some terrible bicycle voodoo on my back. It was an exciting weekend.

Late friday afternoon I was checking on the rear tire. I’d pumped it up a few weeks ago, only to find the next day that it was flat. So I pumped it up to 55 psi — the normal pressure I keep it at — and waited. I figured there was a leak somewhere, and thought I could feel a small amount of air coming out around the valve. So I leaned close to the valve and listened. Stupid idea. After a second of listening and with no warning, the tire blew. PAFF! Right in my face. Thankfully all it did was leave my ears ringing for about a half hour, and things were fine…

Yesterday I was treated to this lovely deviantART subscription nag screen, which would not retreat from the site until I clicked the little “no thanks” button at the bottom. How very lame. My feeling is, if I wanted to continue using their service I would care enough to notice and renew it. As it stands, their bargain price of 8 cents a day is about twice what I pay for hosting here at NFS. I’ve been on the fence for a while about leaving the website all together, and this is pretty much the end. If I were Fella, I’d be crying at how dissapointing his site has become.

Writing CSS (CSS2) never ceases to amaze me. Whether it’s tweaking this blog, trying to re-theme a php app, or simply experimenting in the Web Developer Extension, I am always struck by how difficult and confusing it is to try to implement very simple design patterns.

Be it centering objects, making layouts use the maximum amount of space, or simply trying to use floats properly, I am always amazed by how seemingly obvious code does not work the way I should think it does. It seems rather silly to me that such a language would be designed such that web designers must resort to specialized recipes to deal with seemingly simple and common page layout designs. While powerful, CSS seems to become more and more a search for hacks and snippets to make many designs possible. Browser support is also an elusive and secretive gem; unless explicitly stated, what works in one browser will probably at some point fail mysteriously in another.