Wow, I’ve managed to leave my blog to rot for over a year. It really isn’t suprising as I’ve been extremely busy with the business and when not busy with the company, I’m either traveling to/from Houston or spending time with the family.

Maybe it’s time to start posting again?

I’ve been working a new project with a customer and I’ve transitioned to a early (5:30am) wakeup and pre-7:00am arrival. I’m reminded that it’s actually kind of nice and how much you can knock out before lunch. I may actually change to a 6:00am arrival so I can bust out early to tend to other customers in the PM.

Melissa and I went in for the 19-20th week sonagram today. Dr. Blair looked everything over, skull, heart, face, cerebellum and said everything looked good. We’ll go back in 4 weeks for another look. The big news is that he is 95% sure we’re having a girl so we can start preparing. I was just happy the science part went well, but knowing what we are having means we don’t have to call it, ‘it’ anymore! I’m thrilled! Due date is still 8-10 September.

We are in the process of selling our house and needed to fix the ceiling in one of the front rooms of our 102 year old house. We asked a friend over and borrowed some gear and started on Saturday tearing out the old 1/4″ drywall. It took us 5 hours to get all the old drywall out and pull the nails, what a pain. We went back in with 1/2″ drywall and finished up most of it by Sunday afternoon. I got to finish the job myself and then tape and float. It turned out looking pretty good, but what a pain! The best part of the whole deal was the dryall lift that we rented, without it we would have had a huge mess. Second best is that I know how to drywall now, interesting stuff that I really never want to do again!

This article has a very interesting write up on the fact that few or no animals have been found to be drowned by the tsunami that killed close to 150,000 humans.

We had a very bad 23rd. With the weather so poor we let all of our dogs into the house while we were out at my wife’s mothers. We came home to find that the dogs had killed our oldest cat. It was a horrible situation and we are still unsure what we are going to do with the dogs that were involved. We buried Dodi today at my mother-in-law’s farm. We’ll miss Dodi dearly, he was a wonderful cat who just wanted to be a cat and hunt around the yard.

Merry Christmas to everyone! I hope everyone has had a wonderful Christmas and that Santa is very good to you, if you’ve been good.

Santa brought me a Microsoft Wireless Elite Keyboard and Mouse, which I had been wanting for sometime. It is actually very nice and I’m loving the features. I’ve got it up and running under Windows without much trouble, just download the drivers and viola. I had anticipated quite a bit of fun getting it working under Linux, but I’ve got basic functionality up and going already. So here is my setup for getting the Microsoft Wireless Elite Keyboard and Linux working together.

I needed to edit my /etc/X11/XF86Config as follows:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
Option "Buttons" "7"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"
EndSection

and then I needed to add the following to my .xinitrc (or ~/.config/xfce4/xinitrc in my case):


/usr/X11R6/bin/xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5"
#imwheel -k -b "67"


It turns out that it actually seems to work better with imwheel killed and straight X to get the codes, I’ll test more later.

For the keyboard I had to add some stuff into /etc/conf.d/local.start (may be different for other distributions, but this should give the idea…could go into rc.local,etc.)


# /etc/conf.d/local.start:
# $Header: /var/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/conf.d/local.start,v 1.4 2002/11/18 19:39:22 azarah Exp $
# This is a good place to load any misc.
# programs on startup ( 1>&2 )
setkeycodes e073 227
setkeycodes e074 228
setkeycodes e075 229
setkeycodes e076 230
setkeycodes e077 231
setkeycodes e078 232
setkeycodes e016 233
setkeycodes e025 234
setkeycodes e03c 235
setkeycodes e064 236
setkeycodes e059 237
setkeycodes e001 238
setkeycodes 55 200
setkeycodes 74 201
setkeycodes 75 202


The last 3 entries are my so far abortive attempt to get the wheel on the keyboard working, so they can safely be ignored for the time being.

I then put the following into ~/.Xmodmap:

keycode 115=F13
keycode 116=F14
keycode 117=F15
keycode 161=XF86Calculator
keycode 174=XF86AudioLowerVolume
keycode 176=XF86AudioRaiseVolume
keycode 160=XF86AudioMute
keycode 234=XF86Back
keycode 233=XF86Forward
keycode 214=XF86Launch0
keycode 215=XF86Launch1
keycode 216=XF86Launch2
keycode 217=XF86Launch3
keycode 218=XF86Launch4
keycode 228=XF86Favorites
keycode 239=XF86Documents
keycode 236=XF86Mail
keycode 178=XF86WWW
keycode 142=XF86Away
keycode 162=XF86AudioPlay
keycode 164=XF86AudioStop
keycode 237=XF86AudioMedia
keycode 153=XF86AudioNext
keycode 144=XF86AudioPrev
keycode 241=XF86Pictures
keycode 240=XF86Music


Then I just mapped away into XFCE, but should be fairly straight forward for other WM’s.

My old blog was nuked by a server dying and me not having a good mysql backup. This will be my new and improved Blog!