Keyboards, the Neverending Saga

If you're anything like me, you're very specific about your requirements for a keyboard. I've been searching for a keyboard for about a year and a half, and so far I haven't been able to find anything that fits the requirements. Maybe I'm just sentimental, but I really like the Logitech Elite keyboard that is no longer being made. I bought one years ago and it's perfect for me. One of the things I really like about it, and what I haven't been able to find in any other keyboard is the scroll wheel. A keyboard with a scroll wheel? Yeah, it may seem odd, but considering that I use a trackball that doesn't have one it works really well.

So what am I looking for in a keyboard? Well, I'd like a keyboard, preferably black with a scroll wheel. It has to be really comfortable but it doesn't have to be ergonomic. It absolutely must have good, solid feedback. I find it really awkward to type on something that's too spongey, and it hurts to wrists to use something that too stiff. As much as I love the feel of the Das Keyboard it's too loud, so another requirement is that it has to be pretty quiet. Lastly, the layout of the 6-pack (home, end ...) has to be just that: a 6 pack. I'm really getting sick of seeing all these otherwise decent keyboards having a really screwy layout for the keys that as a programmer I use all the time.

In short:

• Scroll wheel
• Comfortable
• Quiet
• Good Feedback
• Non-screwy 6-pack
• Mac compatible

I almost forgot, as I use a Mac it needs to be Mac compatible.

As I mentioned earlier, I've not been able to find a keyboard that fits these requirements other than the Logitech Elite. So where does that leave me? Well, certainly without a keyboard that meets my requirements without looking on ebay. I guess I'll have to relax my requirements a bit, the only problem is that my search for keyboards hasn't been very fruitful. Maybe that's because I only have 3 objective requirements, and I've only seen an answer to 2. The others, I can only determine by using it.

The only keyboard that comes close is the Logitech Wave keyboard. Granted it only meets one of my objective requirements, but my hope is that its answer to the subjective ones will far make up for the what it's missing. I think I'll pick it up and see what happens.

Javascript Development Tip #1: no-cache

When doing javascript development that requires files to be loaded from an HTTP server, caching can be a real pain. Turning off browser caching is one solution, but I've always had mixed results. The real solution is to turn off caching on the server side. In order to prevent well behaved browsers from caching your files you simply need to add a header to every response.

The HTTP specification has a list of headers that user-agents and servers should understand, however I've always found the headers around caching to be a bit of a black art. However, for our purposes, there's no magic necessary. To tell the browser not to cache resources, the cache-control header must be set to no-cache. This tells the browser not to cache the resource, not in memory, not in disk, just take the response entity, use it and forget you ever received it.

So, how do you go about adding this header to each response? If you're serving your files from Apache, you can use mod_headers. mod_header allows you to add arbitrary headers to responses. The module has a lot of capabilities, but only the basics are required for our purposes.

The first step is to enable the module by adding a line similar to the following to your httpd.conf. Most installations of Apache have this line conmmented out. If that's the case, just uncomment it.

LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so

With the module enabled, you can have to modify the headers of outgoing responses. If can be configured server-wide, within a virtual host, a directory using .htaccess. You can also enable it in <Directory>, <Location>, and <Files> sections. Whichever you choose, just add the following line, save your changes and restart the server.

Header set cache-control "no-cache"

This tells mod_headers to set the cache-control header to no-cache for all responses within its configured scope. If the cache-control header has already been set, it will be overriden by the value you've specified.

To verify that the configuration worked, clear your browsers cache and make a request to one of the resources covered by the configuration of mod_headers. If you're using Firefox and have Firebug installed, you can switch to the Net tab and look at the response headers.

So there you have it, an easy way to speed up development and reduce your stress by simply removing caching, the real way.