www.lewiz.org

This evening I received an email from the developer of an open source application to duplicate X11 window movement in a Windows environment.

Anybody that’s been reading for a while may know that a little over a year ago, I started a similar project.  The main aim was to allow me to move a window around the screen by holding the Alt key while clicking anywhere on the application window.

I didn’t get around to finishing my code off, but I’m very happy to say that the excellent Taekwindow project, taekwindow.sourceforge.net/, is already an excellent solution to the problem, which even includes window resizing with the right mouse button.

Another brilliant utility the same developer made me aware of was KatMouse, www.code-scout.net/katmouse/, which fixes some of the brokenness of the Windows scroll-wheel model:

In GNOME/KDE the component under the mouse cursor receives a scroll event.  This means that I can scroll a window or frame that does not have focus.

In Windows, the currently focused object receives the scroll event, which is incredibly annoying.  KatMouse is a brilliant fix for this ‘problem’, although I did have to disable ‘Wheel button’ functionality to restore my middle mouse click.

These two applications are already absolute essentials for Windows.  Another nice thing that can be done in Vista, is to enable sloppy focus.  I did some searching and came across shellrevealed.com/forums/thread/5726.aspx which is this very fix.  It involves registry editing, but the change is very simple:

Start regedit.exe, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop

Edit UserPreferencesMask and increment the first hex value by +1 in decimal.  e.g. my UserPreferencesMask was 9E 3E 07 08 12 00 00 00, I did 9E + 1d and changed the value to 9F 3E 07 08 12 00 00 00 (i.e. 9E + 1d = 9F).  A reboot was required but the result was a focus-follows-cursor (technically this is not true, as the last focused application does not lose focus when the pointer leaves the window).

http://blogs.sun.com/lewiz/ now exists!

I’ll probably be sticking the techy stuff on there from now on, probably.

After rebooting to Vista to watch a 720p video, I was much amused by ASUS’ attempt at programming.

Reminds me of Judge Dredd’s classic “I AM… THE LAW!”

So… in VMWare Workstation I can tell my Windows XP guest image that it has two CPUs.

What does this mean?

Will it give me more performance, or is it more for testing SMP configs?

Hah!  I’ve got a better keyboard than him.

How is it that despite owning one of the better PC sound cards and having it hooked up to my pre-amp with decent cables, that CDs still sound a million times more awesome than the uncompressed audio files I ripped from them?

There’s a lot to be said for a decent CD player and ‘speakers.

Also, go buy the Guillemots.

Well, today I decided that I’d do as Liam had done a week or two ago, and clean out my trusty MS Natural Keyboard Pro.

Now, I’ve been using Natural keyboards for quite some time… I used the first one they did, now called the ‘Elite’ model, then I moved onto some other one that was built like a tank (a tank with holes, as it went down in flames when I poured a can of Coke into it), followed by the one I cleaned out today… it might have a name, but I call it the plastick-y one with the grey bits that came after the one built like a tank.

The cleaning went fairly well, I washed each key by hand and they’re probably dry by now.  Unfortunately I also managed to lose one of the keyboard springs (I never saw it… I suspect it never even existed!) and at the same time break one of the legs at the back.

I’m fed up of cleaning my keyboard now (and will get pissed off quickly with a flat keyboard) so I decided to see what Google Checkout could offer me today…

for a mere £26 eBuyer would have sold me the new super-duper fancy black USB keyboard (pictured above).  Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite good enough, so I managed to find a cute £4.49 USB wireless mouse I could use with my laptop… dang, still 51p short!

Eventually I settled on the keyboard, a 4-port unpowered (on purpose, I don’t like chargers) USB hub and a rather sexy-looking 1m green RJ45 cable.

To be honest, I could have probably done better, but the cable will no doubt be useful for attacking people (I had Chris in mind), so I went with it over an even cheaper RJ11 to BT-style ‘phone cable.

Total cost to me: an hour to clean and break my old keyboard, and £25.72 for all of the above mentioned good stuff, including delivery.

Google… I love you!

Intel are demoing a new prototype laptop that is just 0.7in thick, beating the X505 by a whole 0.1in!

More impressive is the screen, built-in wireless (Wifi, WiMAX and cellular (UMTS?)), luminous keyboard and amazing 14 hour battery life.

There’s a very nice review at images.businessweek.com/ss/07/05/0524_metrolaptop/index_01.htm (from where I stole the above photo).  Other nice things are the funky portfolio cover that may include an extra display.

So far there are no specs and I can’t determine if it has an optical drive or not (I hope it doesn’t).  The only place it falls short of the X505 glory is in weight 2.2lbs instead of 1.8!

I’ve been toying with the idea of knocking up a quick film review/sharing system in PHP/MySQL.  This would be used largely by Vlad and myself to quickly mark down films that are worth watching.

After thinking about it a minute or two longer I realised there was a much quicker way of doing it… del.icio.us.

del.icio.us allows users to tag content with for:username, indicating that the site should be brought to the attention of another user.  Today I finally got around to subscribing to the RSS feed for content tagged with for:lewiz... this means that from now on, you can let me know about cool stuff just by tagging it.

How does this apply to the film review system?  Simple:

• Tag the IMDb page for all films that you watch


• Include an out of ten rating as a tag: 9/10


• Apply any other suitable tags


• If the film was good, or you think it is of interest to your friend, mark it for their attention: e.g. for:inomine

And what if you want to share something with a friend and nobody else?  Combine the Do not share functionality with a for:username tag.

Attempt two at running Windows Vista on the desktop and here’s how I’ve found things:

• With my Audigy 2 ZS sound card now working (I had to force Windows to search c:\windows for drivers!) life is much easier.


• Per-application volume controls (done at the mixer-level, not the application level ala some GNOME apps) is a really handy thing.


• Windows Media Player did an awesome job with my DVD.  Specifically: I was half-way through watching Lily when my Lost download finished.  I fired up Lost and once it finished there was a really handy option to resume my DVD playback from where I left off.


• The default font (at least the default font in Firefox and Pidgin) is really great… it looks good, but is also very easy on the eyes.  I like the Bitstream fonts used in Ubuntu, but this is far better.


• The ClearType sub-pixel font rendering is not what I’m used to.  It’s a lot better than in XP, but I’m not convinced it’s as good as we have in GNOME.


• Due to an issue with my graphics card, I’ve disabled the fancy Aero 3D desktop.  With the non-fancy one I can’t figure out how to change the colours of titlebars, the Start bar, etc.  I find the difference in blue between active and inactive window too subtle.


• Firefox feels a lot quicker (than under Linux/GNOME), as do a few other operations and actions.


• There is no ‘telnet’ command by default.  This is a mistake, it clearly wasn’t taking up much space, and it’s incredibly useful to have around.


• Pidgin installs quickly and easily, providing a superior replacement to the Windows Live Messenger.  There is some graphics corruption from time to due to, I presume, a GTK+ issue.


• I can run Lightroom, Photoshop and a whole host of other applications without using virtualisation software.  This is the real reason I’m interested in a non-Linux/Solaris desktop.


• Playback of non-region 2 DVDs is a bit of an issue.  I think I only have a few more goes at switching the hardware region before it gets locked.  Under Linux all of my DVDs play without issue.

All in all I’m coping.  There doesn’t seem to be too much that I used to be able to do that I can’t do now.  I’ll see how things work out…