doit, doit now!

I’m going to update WordPress.

This post is really just to ping Google to get them to reindex tonight since I fixed up my sitemap.

So as it turns out the media playback keys on the DiNovo work automagically under Leopard. Neat!

I forgot to point this out earlier: the diNovo mouse, the Logitech MX900, has 4 extra buttons that can be reassigned to various functions. I like to use OSX’s built-in support for mapping those buttons to Dashboard and Exposé. It makes using both Exposé and Dashboard significantly easier and I think more useful.

You can map them to whatever you want in System Preferences -> Dashboard & Exposé. Figuring out which button is which takes a few tries, though, so I have slaved through that horrible chore for you. The results:

• Push down on the scroll wheel = Mouse Button 3
• Rear Thumb Button = Mouse Button 4
• Front Thumb Button = Mouse Button 5
• Weird little button on top = Mouse Button 6

Go to town, kiddos…

So I’ve had a Logitech diNovo keyboard, mediapad, and mouse for a couple of years now. It’s a standard Windows-style keyboard and mouse that operates over Bluetooth. It’s really well-designed and has lots of features (such as extra buttons and a non-retarded shape) the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse lack. Unfortunately in OSX the extra buttons on the keyboard don’t work and the modifier keys are swapped (option swapped with command, etc). Logitech has explicitly stated that they have no intention of producing a driver for the Mac.

I have tried lots of different methods of getting all the keys to work and to swap out the modifier keys so they work properly. Apple allows you to change the modifier key behavior in Tiger but only on a global basis such that it modifies the Macbook Pro’s keyboard as well as the external keyboard. This is annoying since it requires me to change the settings back and forth whenever I take my MBP out of the house. However using Apple’s built-in software the mouse buttons can be assigned to various Exposé actions, which suits me just fine, though other people might want the forward and back buttons to work as they were intended.

There are also some hints of Mac OS X Hints that propose modifying keyboard layouts and such, but all of them are kind of kludgy and don’t really lend themselves to random playing or modification.

I noticed a great little Open Source app called HIDFiddler that accomplishes some of what I need, but it is very young and doesn’t have an obvious mechanism for the modifier-key-swap, just for the extra button thing.

Long story short: I have finally settled on using ControllerMate as the best way to acheive all of my aims. This great, super-cheap ($15!) program allows you to customize essentially every aspect of any controller you have — your mouse, your keyboard, pretty much anything. You can attach AppleScripts to certain keys or swap others out. If you find that you never use the Pause/Break key, for instance, or you want to disable caps lock, you can do that and more.

I spent an hour or so making a configuration for my diNovo Keyboard. I used some of the AppleScripts from HIDFiddler to attach to buttons presses (mainly for iTunes controls). I exported my diNovo ControllerMate files for others to use along with my modified HIDFiddler AppleScripts. Let me know if this is at all helpful to anyone.

If you’ve ever tried to install Ruby, Ruby On Rails, MySQL 5, and the Ruby C bindings via DarwinPorts on Mac OS X, you might find yourself running into a weird error. Or three. My particular problem was that the Ruby gem for the MySQL bindings couldn’t find the MySQL5 header files or libraries, and as such the gem would never compile. DarwinPorts uses its own weird little placement for the files, and as such it took me a few minutes to figure out how to get it to build. So, assuming you have a default install of DarwinPorts and have gone through the trouble of installing Ruby and Ruby gems, just do a

gem install mysql — –with-mysql-lib=/opt/local/lib/mysql5/mysql/ –with-mysql-include=/opt/local/include/mysql5/mysql/

and everything should work swimmingly.

Poor Tuttle, OK– they have Jerry Taylor as their City Manager. It seems his hosting provider installed CentOS, an excellent Linux distribution, on the computers used to host Tuttle’s web site, but never configured the computers after the initial install. The web site thus simply showed the default CentOS web page, which includes instructions as to how to configure it. Jerry Taylor instead wrote the CentOS team and threatened to call the FBI unless they “removed their website from his website.”

The CentOS guys were extremely nice about it, even as they became exasperated with how dense this guy was. They had no obligation to provide any support to this guy, but they did, and every time they asked him for the information they needed he became more irate and ignorant. Finally they just went ahead and figured out who the guy’s ISP was for him and told him to go ask the ISP, and after the ISP resolved it, Jerry had the audacity to tell the CentOS guys that it would have been better for them to solve the problem for him more quickly.

Hats off to Jerry Taylor, the most smartest man in Tuttle, OK!

I was tooling around looking for a Gallery2 export plugin for iPhoto to make it easy for my Dad to upload pictures of his new restaurant, Stella’s Restaurant and Bar, to his website. I found a couple examples, but none of them had been compiled for Intel Macs. Luckily the source is available for Gallery2Export, so I just downloaded it and compiled it with XCode. I’ve done this with a few other FOSS packages lately in order to make Intel-native versions, and generally have met with excellent success.

Here’s the file if you’re interested.

So the idiotic broadband companies are trying to do away with net neutrality and charge companies like Google for “access to their pipes.” The net effect of this would be that, unless Google paid a company like Verizon a fee, Verizon could slow down your and my access to Google when using Verizon’s lines.

Nevermind that consumers and businesses both pay for access to the Internet—because Verizon and Comcast and SBC don’t do anything exciting except connect us to the Net they feel like they’re missing out on the money that truly innovative companies like Google and Yahoo are making.

Message to Verizon, et al: you guys are like the water company. We need you, but only so much as to make sure that the data is flowing, and then to stay the hell out of our way. We don’t want to hear from you, we don’t want to see you, we just want access to the Internet and for you to do it without interruption or annoyance.

So, as usual, I wrote Senators Boxer and Feinstein. My letter:

Dear Senator Boxer:

At Senate Commerce Committee hearings that began today, broadband providers tried to make a case for a new ability to charge various companies for priority service on their networks. They argued that since companies like Google and Yahoo are making money on the Internet that they should somehow get a piece of that pie. I cannot disagree with this position strongly enough. I firmly believe that if these broadband providers are allowed to do such a thing that they will be the only ones who win out, and meanwhile prices will rise for consumers and other businesses while all of the innovation that the Internet has brought us will be stifled.

I am writing to urge you to vote to support any and all measures that would mandate net neutrality for Internet service providers. I am a small business owner who makes a living creating innovative Internet solutions. California is a state of companies that do the same, and in the process effectively drive the Californian, American, and even global economy. The Internet has always been governed by an implicit principle of net neutrality, and as such has allowed all of the innovations of the fifteen years to happen.

As it currently stands, consumers pay for access to the Internet. Likewise, companies like Google pay for their access to the Internet. Why exactly these broadband companies think that they should be able to impose restrictions or charges on either of those two parties when both are already paying for the service in the first place is beyond me.

As Google has pointed out, the barriers to entry for being an innovative company on the Internet are extremely low– anybody with a good idea and some dedication can create something amazing in their garage– and those barriers are so low almost entirely because of net neutrality. Imposing fees on a company of Google’s size wouldn’t do much to their bottom line, but it would raise that barrier to entry so high that the next Google or Yahoo would probably never be able to get off the ground. When the next amazing thing comes along it may never see the light of day unless net neutrality is maintained.

This issue is of such vital importance to our state, country and economy that I do not think it can be stressed enough. Please do whatever it takes to see that net neutrality is mandated, that prices remain reasonable for everyone, and that innovation can continue to flourish on the Internet.

Sincerely,

Nick Hodulik

In my last post I pointed out that conservative Australian politicians are worried that an HPV vaccine will encourage girls to be promiscuous. It turns out I did not do my homework and that, as we all have come to expect, this absurd viewpoint is all over America, too.

The notion that kids are not having sex because of the specter of HPV is just stupid. There’s absolutely no evidence for it. Hey, I have an idea! Let’s stop developing antibiotics because they can be used to cure chlamydia! It doesn’t matter that antibiotics cure other infections and save lives—if we have them PEOPLE WILL HAVE SEX WHEN WE DON’T WANT THEM TO! And Jesus doesn’t like that.

I just don’t get why the Religious Right thinks it can shove its viewpoint down the throats of all Americans, especially when people’s lives are at stake. I am so sick of having to live in fear of these people, of the specter that somehow the little progress that has been made for civil rights for LGBT people and for women’s sexual health will be snatched away in the name of a false Jesus.

Again, this does not bode well for the emergence of vaccines for other sexually-transmitted diseases, notably HIV. There will be an outcry from these people when such a vaccine is developed, and it will be a sad day for all of us. I wonder why we don’t head this off at the pass and start asking these bad people now if they are going to oppose a vaccine when it finally arrives.

I love it when developers come up with tweaks to augment software that should be in the original software in the first place. Dashboard Starter does nothing more and nothing less that load up all of your Dashboard widgets under OS X 10.4 immediately upon login rather than forcing you to wait for the 5-10 seconds it takes to after a reboot. It’s a small, silly thing, but it eliminates much grumbling and gnashing of teeth.