Dear Lazyweb,

Recently my Compose key stopped working in applications using the X input method (such as rxvt-unicode). Gtk applications using either the default Gtk input method or SCIM work fine; setting GTK_IM_MODULE=xim breaks them. I have Option "XkbOptions" "compose:ralt,ctrl:nocaps" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. xev correctly reports that Multi_key is being pressed when I push the right alt, but rxvt-unicode et al. totally ignore it when I push it at them.

I have no idea why this happens. I asked the #rxvt-unicode people, and they have no idea either. I would love someone to tell me what to examine next!

Edit (2007-10-10): Fixed!

It was all my fault. I had a .XCompose file with an entry for Compose-t-m giving ™, but did not have the magic line include "%L" which makes all the normal compose sequences for your locale be loaded. Thanks to Simon for helping me figure this out!

Dear Lazyweb,

My external keyboard has an "eject" button. When I prod it, if the CD in the drive is not in use it is unmounted and the drive ejected; if the CD is in use, nothing happens. This is pretty much the behaviour I expect and want.

My laptop's keyboard does not have an eject button, so when I'm somewhere other than home I have to unmount the disk manually. Is there a sensible way to make the eject button on the drive behave like the software eject key, rather than working iff the disk is not mounted?

This proposes "a fix", which is to not lock the tray while the disk is mounted. This sounds like a really bad idea — "Hey! Program doing useful stuff with that disk when I accidentally poked the eject button! You lose! Ha ha ha!" — particularly since sensible software methods exist.

I remember seeing a program somewhere on the 'tubes that polled the drive every second or so to see if the button had been pressed and if so called eject. Submount exists, but my brief investigation suggests that it polls, too. I'm uncomfortable with the idea of such frequent polling. Surely there must be some file in /proc or something that such a program could block on, waiting for an event?

Love,

Will

Dear Lazyweb,

So I've just been speaking with some family friends. One of them is a 13-year-old gamer, mostly of the strategy and crazy fantasy warfare variety, and he's interested in making his own games. He isn't, to my knowledge, a programmer, so something like pygame is probably not suitable (although I guess he could learn). Many years ago, I used a piece of software called The Games Factory, which was pretty bad but did the job for making simple 2D games, and I'm aware of Adventure Game Studio, which does what it says on the tin and might be the kind of thing he's after. Can anyone recommend any other game creation software (for Windows, sadly) that doesn't need prior programming knowledge? I guess that some tool that needs you to learn some scripting language for some stuff but is a gentle introduction to it is probably the right kind of thing.