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.

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 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.

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

My first installation of VISTA wasn’t too smooth as I said here.     Today I have tried installing iTunes again on VISTA, this version 7.2.0.35 works fine.    I’m delighted as I have so much in my iPod.

As of today there were 1,011 downloads for various versions of [tag]ezLogin[/tag] plugin.

This proves the popularity of this feature which should have been built into the core of WordPress.    Habari, a new blogware, has this feature out of the box, although I also made a minor hack to it.

I have been busy setting up and making it usable at work a new PC running under [tag]VISTA[/tag].    My friend put this together for me for about $700.    I’m quite happy with performance so far, below is the score

The latest version Getz is out for nearly two weeks now.   I have just tried automatic upgrade with one of my dummy test site here.

All my plugins work fine and I still want to watch it for a while before moving up.    There were too many minor versions recently and I don’t bother upgrading whenever a new version is out.

Windows [tag]Automatic update[/tag] is sort of like your regular health check.    What if your doctor who does your regular check isn’t reliable?    This is what happened to the recent Windows automatic update.    If you are running Windows XP like me you may find the process [tag]svchost[/tag] eating up 100% CPU usage for prolonged period.    That’s was like very high blood pressure for no reason.    Your computer may become unresponsive and even hang up.

You need this pill (id 927891) and this drug (id 932494) to cure this high blood pressure.    I took these then later found that I have missed 8 Nos of updates of 38.2Mb in total size.

I thought the high blood pressure was due to a virus which I did find one called Generic4.pjr of Trojan Horse type but that wasn’t very harmful.

I watched 2 movies during my trip to Japan.    The Pursuit of Happyness was a bit disappointing.    I read critics earlier and I thought there would be coverage of Mr Gardner’s career struggles after has has started his own business.    There are touching moments, no doubt, but overall I was expecting more than that.

On the return trip I picked something lighter which was Music and Lyrics.    Everything that Hugh Grant does is predictable of course but the attraction this time is the music.    I now understand when you get older it’s easy to live in one’s shadow of the past.    Having a break through in life is easily said then done.