Colin has raved about the joys of middle clicking for a while now, but I was never able to enjoy it because clicking my mouse's middle button never seemed to do all of the cool things that his did. Mine brought up a really weird multi-directional arrow thing that was supposed to let me scroll in any direction I wanted - except that it rarely worked the way I wanted it to.

Well, I finally decided it was time to fix it once and for all so that I could enjoy middle clicking like the rest of the world.

The mouse in question that I'm using is the Logitech MX700 *.

Here's what my mouse settings dialog looked like when it didn't work:

Now that it does work, it looks like this:

The difference is subtle, but all I did was change the functionality for the middle button from "Universal Scroll" to "Middle Button." That was way too easy for me to have missed it for this long, but I'm glad I finally found it. If you're having a similar problem getting your MX700 (or other similar Logitech mouse) doing middle clicks the way you want, check out what your setting is.

* - The Logitech MX700 is a great mouse that has a recharging dock so you don't have to buy batteries all of time... I've been using mine for almost 3 years without any new batteries. I can also highly recommend the Logitech MX1000, which I use at home. I plan on sticking with Logitech mice unless Microsoft ever releases a wireless mouse with a rechargeable dock. That rechargeable dock makes all of the difference.

I'm having my first 9 minutes of fame... ever!

Check it out here!

(from Jon Galloway)

For those of you who don't subscribe to digg, check this out.

From the website:

"The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team sent us a cake for the upcoming release of Firefox 2!"

(via digg)

I guess this is really more of a link regarding ASP.NET AJAX and Full Trust.

Ken Cox points out that the new AJAX extensions install themselves into the GAC instead of a Bin subdirectory. I hadn't really thought about this until he notes how this affects those of us (me included) who have shared web hosting.

I've been putting a picture slideshow together for my sister's wedding and I've spent the past couple of nights working on a nice, AJAX-y website that would allow her to pick her own captions for the pictures and customize the slides without me having to email a huge PowerPoint file to her. It sounds like I'll have to look at another option for the time being, though, because I doubt I'll be able to convince my web host to install beta software to the GAC.

*sigh*

What fun it is being a beta junkie.

I recently installed GhostDoc 1.9.5 on Vista RC2 at home. At first, I received as error towards the end of installation so I searched around a little bit to see if anyone else had seen the error. Then, as with most issues I've had with Vista, I decided to see if elevating the install to admin would work which seems to have worked fine.

The easiest way I've found to run things that don't offer a "Run as admin" option on the click menu (like MSI files) is to run the Command Prompt as an admin and then start the program from there. You can pull up the start menu, type cmd and then CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER which will run the command as an admin (thanks to Kristan Kenney for that info). Quite a nifty shortcut key for running as an administrator.

Earlier this week, I posted on some major problems I was having with trackback spam. By way of a comment, Tim Rayburn pointed me to his post on Akismet support that the nightly builds of dasBlog now included.

As a result, last night, I downloaded the latest build of dasBlog and uploaded the new binaries to my blog. Shortly thereafter, I was able to log onto my blog and see the section for Akismet. Sweet! I went ahead and signed up for a Wordpress account (by doing so, you can get a free Akismet API code). Things were looking great so I thought I'd let it go and check it the next day.

Today is the next day and I just finished deleting about 250 spam trackbacks on various posts. Needless to say, I've disabled Trackback support on my blog again.

My problem is that I'm not sure if I messed up on my upgrade or if there is a problem with the Akismet support... OR maybe it is because of the possibility that my web host doesn't allow web requests (see Phil's post on WebPermission and Akismet in SubText). I'm not in control of the web server my blog runs on, so I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that my blog doesn't have WebPermission. I guess my problem is that I'm not really sure if that's the problem or if it is something else entirely. I'm blogging this from work over my lunch break, so I don't have time to dig through logs right now.

I guess I'm just blogging because I'm a little down because Trackback spam won today.

Spam is stupid.

Okay, maybe it isn't hilarity, but it is somewhat ridiculous when Vista will let you get around a compatibility dialog warning you that a program isn't currently compatible on this version of Windows but a similar dialog that is displayed when you try to uninstall the same application that will not let you override it*!

At least as far as I can tell - YMMV.

(I wish I had thought to take screenshots... I did a quick search online but didn't come up with any examples of the dialogs I mentioned... sorry)

* I was installing/uninstalling Nero 6... installing so that I could copy a CD and uninstalling so I could install Nero 7, which is now supported on Vista.

I finally had to disable trackbacks on my blog. Even with some of the antispam features of dasBlog, I was still getting hit like crazy. Just today, I got about 150 spam trackbacks to 3 or 4 of my posts. And I'm even running version 1.9.6264.0! I did notice this post about an HttpModule that will block trackbacks based on regular expression patterns. I was curious if anyone else had used this or another method to effectively fight (or even prevent) trackback spam. Or maybe I'm just missing an updated blacklist for my configuration.

Help anyone?

UPDATE: Thanks to a post from Tim Rayburn (and a comment directing me there!), it looks like the newest nightly build of dasBlog supports Akismet -- and Akismet apparently also supports better Trackback spam blocking! Looks like I might be dogfooding the latest build of dasBlog soon!

I was catching up on some older blog posts from different people recently and I came across some posts talking about how wonderful SlickRun is. Everyone is right, by the way, because SlickRun is amazing. It was probably the main program that moved me from being primarily a mouse user to a keyboard user. I still love how fast I can get around by taking my hand off the mouse and keeping them on the keyboard!

Anyway, I'm a beta junkie and I love finding out about new releases of software. I'd been looking for news on SlickRun for a while, but hadn't seen anything so I thought I would check out the SlickRun forums. I ended up finding this post where Eric notes that, because he is actually working on Windows Vista, the alphas for SlickRun probably won't show up until after the RTM for Vista.

Though I don't think a forum post carries nearly as much weight as a blog post on release announcements, I still have to say that I can't wait to see what Eric is working on for the new version. I'm looking forward to more from SlickRun!

I'm a big fan on Windows OneCare. I installed the betas and was thoroughly impressed at it. I recently posted in frustration, though, that the current version wasn't supported in Vista yet. Well, the 1.5 beta has now been released and it is supported under Vista. Here's a screenshot of it on my machine:

So far so good!

I recently updated my Vista installation to RC2 (build 5744), which went fairly smoothly for me. The installation went even better than for RC1, because I had moved my documents to my D: drive, so once I told Vista where they were, most of my initial configuration was done! I did have one weird problem with installation, but it disappeared when I booted from the DVD instead of attempting to install from within the previous install of Vista.

I ran into my biggest problem today, though, when I attempted to install Visual Studio 2005. I had downloaded the ISO quite a while back and had used it to install VS2005 first on Windows XP SP2 and later on Vista RC1 without any problems. Under XP, I was able to use the Virtual CD tool that Microsoft provides, but it wasn't supported under Vista. As a result, I had found the SlySoft Virtual CloneDrive, which worked great on Vista RC1. It didn't seem to work so well on Vista RC2 and I have no idea why.

The Visual Studio 2005 installation would fail with an error loading the file Rmt9x.mst. My problem sounded quite a bit like this one detailed on the MSDN forums, but I wasn't sure. I had also noticed some strange behavior with restarting since I had installed RC2, such as the restart hanging, even to the point of me having to power down my computer instead of waiting on the restart. On a hunch, I decided to uninstall Virtual CloneDrive and give DAEMON Tools a try. It helped that DAEMON Tools said that it supported Vista!

Once Virtual CloneDrive was uninstalled, I started up the DAEMON Tools installation which asked for a reboot. I was a little wary, but went ahead and let it and it rebooted without any hangs! First good sign!

After the reboot, I started up DAEMON Tools and pointed it to the VS2005 ISO and started up setup. The installation ran great, so everything points to something in Virtual CloneDrive not working as expected under RC2.

As I mentioned earlier, I still have no idea why Virtual CloneDrive began having problems under RC2. It ran great under RC1 and I really liked the interface it provided. DAEMON Tools is admittedly less user friendly, but it certainly gets the job done, which is what I needed.

I recently moved my documents from my C: drive over to my D: drive at home. My C: drive is a 10,000 RPM Raptor drive, which is insanely fast, but doesn't provide as much disk space (still a completely worthwhile tradeoff IMHO). As a result, though, I don't have room on my C: drive for a lot of other things like programs and games, which is why moving my documents to the D: drive is so nice. This is what it looks like in Vista:

Now, notice the buttons on this screenshot, specifically the "Restore Default," "Move," and "Find Target" buttons. Do you see them in the screenshot below?

I don't!!!

Where are they?!?

The only difference that I can tell is that the one is for my personal folder and the other is for the Public folder... is it a security setting? I'm not sure, but I tried running Windows Explorer as an Administrator and it still didn't work. I'm currently running build 5600 (RC1).

I'm not the only one to experience this behavior.