Logitech MX620 cordless laser mouse

Just got my new mouse in the mail: a Logitech MX620 cordless laser mouse (from Amazon). So far (about 20 seconds) I love it:

• It's very sensitive. On a "4D Steel" gaming mousepad the slightest twitch sends the pointer flying. I've had comments about how high I set the sensitivity of my mice and this makes me feel out of control. Awesome.
• It works out of the box. No charging (it came with separate alkaline batteries), no messing around with drivers (I'm on Ubuntu 8.04) and no cables -- just a little USB dongle into the back of my workstation. Even the few buttons (forward, back and search) work without configuration in Ubuntu.
• It is comfortable. For a righty, only -- it's molded to be used by the right-hand only, but my hand fits around it more comfortably than the standard Dell or Microsoft hand-blob.
• The scroll-wheel "click" can be turned off. This is the best thing, I think -- a little switch on the bottom of the mouse turns off the scroll-click feeling under the wheel, allowing it to freewheel like a BMX in mid-air.

It's probably all a matter of personal taste, but for me this is an ideal mouse. The more expensive models may have more buttons, or software-control of the scroll wheel, but I don't think I'd ever turn it off (even if I could find software for GNU/Linux).I'll write up a more thorough review once I've been using it for a while.

I'm the Friday night sacrificial lamb

So it's Friday night and I'm at work, sacrificing my evening of possibly-drunken irresponsibility to the dark and hungry IT gods. Truly sacrificing, too -- the others on the audio-conference are actually doing something; I'm here as part of the application team merely to appease and give the appearance of dedication and concern. Do I care if our clients can't do their testing tomorrow? Not particularly. Will I get in trouble if I slip off the call and head home for DVDs, pizza and perhaps a triple-shot of vodka? Indubitably, neck-deep in it. So I remain.

Worse, my work laptop is locked safely in a drawer I can't open. So it's not like I could be at home and logged in via the VPN even if I could somehow get there instantaneously (Stargate, anyone?).

Worse still, even if I broke the lock (as surely as this problem is breaking my spirit) and retrieved said lappy, I'd be left with a laptop I can't log-in to -- thanks to some foolishness with static IPs it no longer joins the Windows domain; I've long since forgotten the cached password required to get in and mess with the IP settings. So getting back to the happy place where I can work from home requires: breaking into a desk drawer; rebuilding the laptop with the standard office environment; reinstalling all the other crap I use to work remotely, and; getting every password I use renewed.

Unlikely to happen at 9pm on a Friday, methinks.

Drivel

I just installed Drivel, a blogging client, so I'm trying it out now. It looks like you can format, although the content pane shows the HTML tags rather than a pretty WYSIWYG field. It's arguably better that way, of course -- different blog APIs can support a different subset of all formatting tags, so allowing (forcing) people to see the tags means you never post something unsupported. In theory, anyway.

Of course, you never know exactly how things are going to look until you post it. So I better do it now!

Drupal, eUKHost, HTML posts and mod_security

Last night I finally figured out something which has been driving me crazy for months: posting HTML (and PHP) content to Drupal (6 or 5) using eUKHost for hosting -- they have Apache's mod_security switched on, but not configured.

Drupal can be installed via Fantastico (an icon on the CPanel administration site that eUKHost gives you), but just didn't work. Every time I tried to post HTML or PHP (or even just something with a particular combination of angle-brackets) I would be redirected to the front page and the content lost. Very frustrating indeed!

I installed and reinstalled Drupal, both from a downloaded package and through Fantastico, and spent a long time looking at the Apache logs and reading about HTTP responses, but eventually I had to admit that it wasn't my setup -- it was eUKHost. So I started searching for that instead, and finally found a comment suggesting that it, "sounds like mod_security isn't setup properly."

So I immediately opened a support ticket with eUKHost, then started researching on how to turn mod_security off. Turns out it's easy -- add the following to your .htaccess file:

SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off

Save the file and you're done.