August 2005 Archives

I've had the Mighty Mouse for almost two weeks now.

• I learned to right click more or less consistently. Yeah, that's not so great, is it? In effect it meant that I'd right click on the mouse most of the time, but also hold down control. That was not why I turned it off though...
• I learned that I'm a one button mouse kind of guy. Being able to just hit the mouse to click is more important than this silly right clicking business. So today I made the right button map to the "primary button" again. Yay. Much happier that way.
• I haven't used the "side buttons" even once since I tried them to write my first impressions entry.
• I'm starting to get used to use the scroll wheel, it's pretty neat. My "motor memory" wants to navigate it like you use the little red dot on IBM Thinkpads. That's a mistake; you have to use it like you would an actual wheel.

ps. I was out (read: in bed with a fever) from the middle of last week until yesterday, so if you were waiting for a mail or some such from me: I should catch up soon.

This took me much too long to figure out.

If you are using Ruby on OS X and MySQL isn't working you probably need to upgrade (or really just recompile, but ...) the MySQL extension.

You can get it here.

According to the Google Zeitgeist, in June "Perl Programming" was the most searched "indoor activity". (In about a month you should use this link to get to the archive page - but they haven't put that it up yet).

(via email from Jim Brandt)

UPS dropped off my Mighty Mouse ($47 at Amazon) today.

I haven't had it for an hour yet, but here are a few first impressions:

• It has the same problem as the wireless mouse - it's just not shiny. I like the look of the pro mouse
• Unlike the wireless mouse, it feels a little lighter than the pro mouse.
• I can't make the "second button" work consistently. My usual way of clicking the left button is "put a bit more pressure on the whole mouse" �?? no fine-motor-control-finger-motion for me, so I might not even be holding the mouse right.
• The good news is that the design that makes the right click not work for me allows me to keep left clicking like I used to (I don't like regular mice so much because I can't do that).
• I tried reassigning the trackpoint button which is easy to click to "secondary button", but no can do.
• I'm not sure I care about the right click button, I didn't miss it before.
• The trackpoint thing seems pretty neat, but I'm not sure I'm going to use it. Much too much fine finger motor control required which is entirely incompatible with my RSI infested hands.
• The side buttons barely barely have any tactile feedback. They are pretty hard to press; I can't imagine using them much.

Will I keep it on my desk? Not sure... The wireless mouse ($59 at Amazon) didn't make it many minutes on my desk (we use it for the mac mini with the projector now), but this one is at least going to get a chance.

update - I posted a quick update.

I've put up the slides from the Build Easily Extensible Perl Programs (~115KB PDF) talk that you maybe saw the intro page from earlier.

It's mostly code snippets from the mail server project I started years and years ago. (Watch out for more on qpsmtpd later this month or next...)

Over in the Apache HTTPd project they have Summer of Code project to build mod_smtpd, a C smtpd module Apache.

It's a nice cycle. The Qpsmtpd plugin system is based, at least in spirit and some of the conventions, on the Apache module system and since 2002 I had a make a mod_perl smtp handler on the TODO. Last year Will Whittaker proved the mod_perl API was ready by making Apache::SMTP (does that still work? Didn't the mod_perl API change?) and Matt Sergeant wrote us Apache::Qpsmtpd which is now used at apache.org for a couple of million incoming emails a day.

Not so long ago I took over maintenance of the NTP Pool project.

If you have a static IP and an NTP daemon running (or you can start running one), please consider adding your server to the pool. In particular if you are in Asia, South America, Australia or one of the many under-served countries in Europe (the goal is to have 30+ servers in each country).

update: Oops, I made a typo in the code last night so adding a server sometimes didn't work. If you tried and had trouble making it work, please try again and email me if it's not working. :)

How can I adjust the volume for the "audible bell" in Terminal.app on OS X? It's not paying attention to the "Alert Volume" in Sound preferences and I can't find another preference for it.

I find the "Visible Bell" even more annoying, so that's not a solution. I'd like to keep using the default Terminal program.

I used iTerm once. I stopped when it grew to use hundreds of megabytes of memory after having some log files scroll through a window for a couple of days and the authors response was "don't do that".

I did a super-short lightning talk on Bitcard at OSCON. The slides are here. There's more documentation on the API page

Lightning talks are awesome. I sadly missed most of them this year because my Real World Web Scalability talk overlapped a bit.

I wouldn't mind if more of the conference was super short talks like those. Some of the regular talks have me wanting to bite my arm off because they went too slow and too long and just had too little content. Of course there are also many talks that are just perfect for 45 minutes. (Like my scalability talk which is ~40 minutes at full speed which people seem to enjoy ;-) )

I do appreciate the logistical trouble with having more speakers. With shorter talks you can't let them all in for free and then it's harder to make them come and talk and so on.

Woah, been much too busy to post anything during OSCON. It's been lots of fun. Not learning so much, but it's been fun to see old friends and meet new people once again. After my Real World Web Scalability talk yesterday I got lots of variations on "most useful talk ever" comments, so that was pretty fun. Maybe I should use it again again again.

We didn't take many photos, but Duncan did. One of them of Vani and myself.

Yes, I haven't shaven for a few weeks...