It’s probably a Firefox 3.1 quirk. But it’s still annoying.

This is mostly good, but I discovered a problem as a side-effect of them improving their mouse support. Now that my mouse is auto-detected with all its buttons, the side-button no longer defaults to being a middle-click. I like having the side-button do middle clicks.

So, no problem, I thought. I’ll just go rebind it. There is doubtless something in the mouse settings that lets me adjust this — I mean, Windows generally handles this fine, so surely Ubuntu will be at least equivalent.

This turned out to not be true.

After a lot of searching, I found the community documentation for the Logitech Marblemouse USB, which (sort of) discusses how to remap buttons.

So I ran:
$ xinput set-button-map "Logitech USB Gaming Mouse" 1 8 3 4 5 6 7 2 9

This didn’t remap it, per se. It swapped clicking the mouse wheel and clicking the side-button.

(I’m not certain that this will persist through a reboot. I might need to meddle with .Xmodmap.)

It’s a weird place to be lacking what I consider basic functionality.

Really this would work on any Debian-derived distro… but I’ve only tried it on Ubuntu.

Update: It looks like mt-daapd puts an admin interface on http://localhost:3689/ (with the default password being ‘mt-daapd’), which you can use to configure things like the location of your music. So you might not even need to do any config file editing…

The back doors of our building had been made over into a hospital entrance, and someone who was the very embodiment of The Wise Old Bum was dispensing advice to people in scrubs, while some sort of faux-homeless band played on the bridge crossing the alley to the parking garage.

Weird.

I’ve mostly found alternatives for all the programs I used. The only area where I’m not quite satisfied is a music player; I used foobar2000 on Windows, and I haven’t found one to match it yet. (I’ve settled on Quod Libet at the moment, though its UI is a bit lacking.)

WoW works, but I seem to be paying a ~10fps tax for running it under Wine. It’s a pain, but it’s still playable.

I still have XP on a partition, but I haven’t yet run into anything I need to boot into it for. This is a promising development.

I’m looking forward to Hardy Heron’s release. It’ll come with the newer nvidia drivers, which apparently improve performance. This will be appreciated, as I’ve been unimpressed by canvas in Linux-Firefox so far.

This seems to be primarily for psychological reasons, because there’s a big fat * after the upgrade.

The footnote is that Mr. Mullenweg mentions in this post that “[y]ou still need a space upgrade to upload certain file types, like movies”, and later in the comments that “[y]ou still need a space upgrade to be able to upload MP3s”. So you still have to pay them if you plan to do anything significant with their bandwidth. (Not sure where they stand on humongous zip files, or similar.)

Not that this is wrong of them. It rings a bit of being an arbitrarily large number chosen for PR reasons, but that’s understandable.

The 3 gig limit is very reassuring to an important segment of the blogoratispheroidalmass. Specifically, the people without their own hosting, who want to be able to post their photos on their blog and not worry about having to trim out old ones after a few months.

50MB = 300-500 decent quality JPEGs of photos. It’s easy to imagine that being a problem after a short while. 3 gigs… not so much.

That would be pretty awesome.

Sadly, I discovered that Dungeon Runners is not a game I can play.

You see, it requires that inbound port 80 be open for your initial connection to a world server. This is a mind-bogglingly weird decision.

Port 80 is an entrenched-by-standards ports — it’s what webservers listen on.

Thus Dungeon Runners is off-limits to two classes of people:

1. People whose ISP block port 80 inbound, because they really don’t want people running servers. (Verizon did this for a while on my connection.)

2. People who run a server. (That’s me.)

Okay, I could shuffle ports around, temporarily assigning 80 to my games computer whenever I wanted to log in. But that’s more effort than I want to put into this. Thus I effectively cannot play Dungeon Runners.

But enough of that.  Who am I?

I’m a 23 year old who immigrated to the USA from England when I was 17. I possess many useful insights into the ways that Americans love Received Pronunciation. (The accent thing may come up more. I have anecdotes, I swear to dog.)

I’m a programmer. I think the first program I ever wrote was (from a tutorial) a calculator in Objective C on a NeXT cube — a revelation that might possibly date me. I didn’t really get into that, though, and it took the discovery of PHP to make me actually realize that, hey, I could actually write useful things. Since then I’ve moved on to Python and Lua as my languages of choice, and am dabbling in Ruby.

I play World of Warcraft. This rather ties into my previous point, since I’m fairly sure that I’ve spent more time writing addons than actually playing. It takes all sorts. Anyway, it’s a thing I intend to talk about, so I disclose it here.

I recognize that this blending of topics makes this blog horribly unmarketable, and I am committing many a sin against recommended traffic-building practices here. Woe is me.