Author: Daniel Mettler

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Technical/business English

Recently, Christian gave an interesting talk how to write correct technical/business English. I hope I can adopt the rules he mentioned, both for my technical writing in papers and in this weblog. Concerning this weblog, I should most importantly try to avoid any expressions that might be perceived as rude, offensive or in any other way inappropriate. This probably isn’t as easy as it sounds as different cultures perceive things differently.

The slides of Christian’s presentation are available on request only (Send him an e-mail message). As a good starting point, he also recommends reading “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk, Jr. which appears to be a classic. Another good web resource: The following Wiki entry.

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No more HTML-ONLY mail

If you send me an e-mail message, please make sure it is in TEXT-ONLY format. All mail in HTML-ONLY format will be marked as SPAM and therefore remain unanswered (messages containing both HTML and TEXT should pass though). Likewise, ANY mail with more than 80% blank lines will be considered as being SPAM.

Thanks for your understanding.

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ergonomically nice mice

currently i’m looking for a mouse with good usability/ergonomics and control. two promising candidates i’ve found so far:

logitech mx510 performance optical mouse (800 dpi/cpi, 5.8 mpixels/s data rate, up to 15g acceleration) (the u.s. model is red as opposed to the european model which is blue)
reviews: hardware pacers, geekextreme, extremetech, gaming nexus. brand new. should offer excellent control (it’s targeted towards hc gamers ;). eventually remove the removable little weight element [picture]

razor viper optical (1000 dpi/cpi, ?? mpixels/s, ?? g)
reviews: ex hardware, tom’s hardware. brand new. razor is renown for gamer gear. probably best control but not very handy for everyday use as it lacks back and forward buttons and other nice features the mx510 offers.

as i don’t intend to use the mouse exclusively for gaming purposes (i mostly use simulators, not fps) i’ll probably go for the logitech mx510 performance optical mouse due to its features (has more buttons).. looking forward to test-driving it :)

btw. it’s a pity that manufacturers don’t offer any truly smoothly scrolling mice.. and last but not least: i don’t like wireless mice for a number of reasons..

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wheelmice and suse 9.0

as i couldn’t post my comment on maol’s recent blog entry (eventually due to a strange konqueror weirdness), i’m posting it here:

Bei mir funktioniert die Radmaus (Intellimouse Exploder 3.0) mit SuSE 9.0 prima (x86, nicht AMD64). XF86Config-Auszug:

Section “InputDevice”
Driver “mouse”
Identifier “Mouse[1]”
Option “Buttons” “5”
Option “Device” “/dev/mouse”
Option “Name” “Autodetection”
Option “Protocol” “imps/2”
Option “Vendor” “Sysp”
Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5”
EndSection

[..]

Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Layout[all]”
InputDevice “Keyboard[0]” “CoreKeyboard”
InputDevice “Mouse[1]” “CorePointer”
Option “Clone” “off”
Option “Xinerama” “off”
Screen “Screen[0]”
EndSection

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renamed mt-comments.cgi script

blogspam is just way too annoying (mt users particularly suffer).. let’s see whether the “pareto solution” works for fighting blogspam. at least for a while, hopefully..

so, as a quick’n’dirty fix i’ve renamed mt’s comment script. please notify me if you experience any problems due to this (does posting comments using your aggregator still work? feel free to test it here)

btw. are there any other (i.e. really good and viable) solutions against blogspam?