Brock Boland

Hacking the Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000

A couple weeks ago, I got a new keyboard for my carpal tunnel issues. It’s pretty comfortable to use, now that I’ve started to get the hang of the split style, but it’s also got all these extra buttons: mail, home page, favorites, things like that. I never understood why anyone would want all that extra crap until I started using them – they’re not a waste of desk space after all!

But this particular keyboard includes at its center a much-touted zoom slider. Who the hell needs a zoom slider? Aside from the elderly or others with poor eyesight, I can’t imagine this thing being useful, and I was pretty disappointed to find that the configuration doesn’t allow you to use it for scrolling instead – something everybody could use.

Lucky for me, I found Josh Highland’s post on the matter. He has a link to download a new version of C:\Program Files\Microsoft IntelliType Pro\commands.xml, but I don’t recommend that. I used WinMerge to diff it against my own, and found that some new stuff had been added since he posted that two years ago.

Thankfully, updating the file is a piece of cake.

1. Go to the C:\Program Files\Microsoft IntelliType Pro folder. Copy commands.xml to another location, just in case something goes wrong and you need to restore the original.
2. Open C:\Program Files\Microsoft IntelliType Pro\commands.xml in your editor of choice.
3. Replace every instance of "ZoomOut" with "ScrollUp".
4. Replace every instance of "ZoomIn" with "ScrollDown".
5. I did not replace IllustratorZoomin or IllustratorZoomout. I don’t know if these should be replaced with ScrollUp and ScrollDown or something else, but I don’t use Illustrator anyway. You can try replacing those if you’d like to.
6. Reboot the machine.
7. Make sure that the slider is enabled by opening Keyboard in the Control Panel and enabling the zoom slider (the name doesn’t change there, but that’s OK).

And bingo bango, you’ve got something useful in the middle of your keyboard. As always, I make no guarantees about this process, do it at your own risk, and try not to set anything on fire.

Visual Studio Express

Thanks to JR, I found out about Microsoft’s recent introduction of Visual Studio Express Editions (as far as I can tell, it was earlier today) (well, yesterday, now). Basically, they’re lightweight versions of Visual Studio targeted at newbies. I decided that ASP would be my next programmatic venture and I keep meaning to find out what all the fuss is about .NET, so I’m hoping that these Express Editions live up to the lofty claims Microsoft has made about them.

I downloaded the Web Developer installer (or rather, installer downloader – I hate when they do that), but didn’t really have a chance to play with it once it finally finished downloading everything I needed for it. It has a built-in test server, so you can play with ASP applications right on your desktop. The part I’m most interested in is the tutorials, videos, and code samples, because I learn best by seeing actual code. Well, actual code with a little direction tossed in to get me started – sifting through uncommented code in a foreign language won’t get you anywhere.

I loaded it up and played for a couple minutes, but the interface isn’t as intuitive as one might hope. It’s pretty similar to VB 6, so I had a rough good idea of what was going on. However, I’m not familiar with any ASP elements, which dominate the left side (turns out, that Radio Button is no ordinary radio button – it’s an ASP Radio Button!)

Hopefully, I’ll find some time to go through the tutorials this weekend. I really do want to learn ASP, because it seems that a lot of companies use it after all. I’ve got Visual Studio 2005 Professional (thanks to the MSDN Academic Alliance), so I could start “for real,” but the Express version is fully compatible and I’m hoping it will offer more in the way of introduction. Come Thursday, the real meat of my quarter will be over, so I should be able to find some free time for playing after that.