Wordpress 2.7.1 has a wonderful quirk of immediately redirecting the “new post” page to a page that appears to just be the row of buttons from above the editor.

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

I recently saw one approach to the “what git branch am I on?” issue, which (if you’re using the bash shell) puts your current branch into your prompt.

There’s also tortoisegit for Windows. TortoiseSVN has always been one of the best things about SVN, so it’s good to see a clone pop up for git.

I updated my desktop to the new Ubuntu release (Intrepid Ibix)

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.

Del.icio.us rebranded to Delicious, along with a new URL. This happened a week or two ago.

Incidentally, this new URL broke my delicious widget. I just noticed that a half-hour ago.

So it’s fixed.

I’ve been very distracted by a new job since the end of April. Thus, quiet.

1. sudo aptitude install mt-daapd
2. Edit /etc/mt-daapd.conf so that mp3_dir = [your music directory]. (Also any other configuration changes you might want to make; the file is well-commented.)
3. sudo /etc/init.d/mt-daapd restart

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…

Yesterday when leaving work I stepped out the back door of our building and almost blundered through someone filming a scene for something.

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.

New version of my del.icio.us widget.

The only real change is that it now allows for multiple instances of the widget. So you can have one showing the ‘food’ tag, and the other showing the ‘yodeling’ tag, say.

WordPress’s API documentation is weirdly incomplete.

The official function reference, for instance, was last updated for WordPress 2.1, and we’re now on 2.5.

This is making updating that widget I wrote be more of a hassle than I expected.

I’ve been running Ubuntu on my home computer for a week and a half now. That’s right, I’ve joined the “A-list blogger circle-jerk”. For certain values of “A”. Specifically, the value “F”.

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.