Update: I’ve done some extensive research and this graphic tablet DOES NOT work in Windows Vista. The Vista driver in the official homepage doesn’t work, and I see no signs from the vendor updating it. Considering all P-ACTIVE tablets use the same driver, I’d advice against any Vista user to buy from them :p
Update #2: After some time, I accidentally got this tablet working again in Vista. The problem seem to be related to wisptis.exe. If you don’t see this running in your tasklist, try Win + R -> wisptis. I did this before I installed the official Vista driver. It worked fine as a pointing device (without pressure detection), then I installed the official driver and voilia! It worked like a charm!
After all these years of comptemplating, yesterday I finally bought the my P-Active XP Pen graphic tablet:
Played around with it for a while. It was not as difficult to pick up as I thought. Here’s a quick sketch I did after like 10 minutes of practice:
Pretty fun to play with, not bad for around $500 HKD 
Under normally circumstances, if you request an HTTP protected resource with your Web browser, the server would return 401 Unauthorized and an popup would appear to ask you for the correct credentials:
That doesn’t look too Web 2.0-ish. Currently there is way to work around this using an AJAX request first (there’s an article that discusses the specific technique used). That way, the browser would “remember” the Authorization header used in the previous AJAX request, so when the user requests another protected resource in the same domain, the browser would also try to include the previously used Authorization header.
However, I couldn’t get it to work.
It turns out that the difference between my approach and the approach used in the article above is this:
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| // My way (doesn't work)
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest;
xhr.open ( 'GET', '/url/to/resource', false );
xhr.setRequestHeader ( "Authorization", "Basic " + Base64.encode ( username, password ) );
xhr.send ( null ); |
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| // The working way
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest;
xhr.open ( 'GET', '/url/to/resource', false, username, password );
xhr.send ( null ); |
Unbeknown to me was the fact that the 4th and 5th parameter of XMLHttpRequest.open() could be used to specify the username and password for the request.
Apparently, the browser doesn’t remember the credentials if I call XMLHttpRequest.setRequestHeader directly.
Note: All these have only been tested to work with MSIE/Firefox. Opera for instance, doesn’t seem to remember the credentials no matter what I tried – it would still pop up an authorization box when the user request a protected resource.
