Mouse problem with VISTA

The keyboard issue is out, the other one is mouse.

I have a ComeMon optical mouse.    For some strange reasons it works only at 1 particular USB port.    VISTA won’t recognize it at any other USB ports.    At that special USB port 3 drivers, namely mouhid.sys moufiltr.sys and mouclass.sys, are used.    I managed to install the mouse at other USB ports manually but only 2 drivers (except moufiltr.sys) are needed.    The strange thing is that I have to do this manual installation at each and every USB port of my PC.

I’m not sure if this issue is related to this Help and Support article which suggests me to boot in safe mode to resolve this issue.

By the way my mouse isn’t of low power type, it needs 100mA, which doesn’t quite like my Microsoft Internet Keyboard which has a 2 port USB hub.

PS: Another possible cause of this problem was due to the Slide-Arch E-Blue keyboard which has a scroll wheel.    If this is installed in XP I got a driver automatically given by Windows update from a third party.    In VISTA this has caused a problem as the scroll wheel in the keyboard is considered a HID compliant mouse that isn’t recognized by VISTA.    I couldn’t find a VISTA driver yet for this keyboard.

jQuery driven sidebar

The collapsible sidebar requires html tags dl, dt and dd. In full dl stands for Definition Listing, dt is Definition Term and dd is Definition Description. These tags must be nested in the right order for this jQuery driven collapsible menu sidebar to work.

If you have a traditional sidebar listing using ul and li tags it’s just a matter of adding dl, dt and dd tags to them to make it work. Alternatively you could style these tags to suit. I was using a class id as “leftbar” to style sidebar listings, now I could style as example below instead.


dt {
background: #E5E5FF;
font-size: 15px;
}
dt a {
color: #0000ff;
font:13px "Trebuchet MS";
display:block;
padding: 5px;
margin: 2px;
text-decoration:none;
}
dt a:hover {
color:#fff;
background-color:#7F80FF;
}
dl {
font:12px "Trebuchet MS";
float:left;
width:200px;
padding-left:0px;
}
dd ul li {
margin:0 0 0 15px;
}
dd ul li a, dd ul li a:visited {
color:blue;
text-decoration:none;
}
dd ul li a:hover {
color:#00BEFF;
}


Habari won’t load jQuery script file until user has logged in. In my case jQuery used up 411 msec out of a total of 1.24 seconds to load this site. This looks a fair % due to this light weight theme so if you have a lot to show on the sidebar I guess this is still worth the time, I think.

Another trick you could play would be restricting certain menu group or links by taking out a ‘dt’ tag. See below example.

[?php if (...check user login...) { _e('[dt]'); } else { _e("Login to expand "); } ?][a href="#"]Spare[/a][/dt]


Without the opening ‘dt’ tag this group is not expandable until admin or someone is logged in. You know of course content is only hidden but viewable under “view source” unless you made them conditional in the script above.

Dead Keys

 Dead Keys are not dead, they are just annoying.

I bought a Slide-Arch E-Blue keyboard, I like it small.    Few keys behaved oddly.  I thought that could be a driver issue as I found a driver for it when installed it at home on XP.

It wasn’t about driver.    I tested it again and again with other keyboards they all behaved the same.    So I turned to the hardware and thought that it might be something else.

I didn’t get to know the key to the issue until I found MS Keyboard Layout Creator which is a neat program for you to redefine your own keyboard layout.    Then I learn about what Dead Key is about.

I never have to worry about typing diacritics because we use simple English during the day.   Too bad I selected English – US keyboard US – International as input language hence this problem.

 

links for 2007-06-07

• KbdEdit – The Best Keyboard Layout Editor For Windows XP, 2003, Vista and x64
  (tags: keyboard editor)