Running Multiple Versions of Firefox on Windows

I hope this is a trivial problem and googling it around gave me no trivial solution

Faced by many web-developers around the world, this context switching issue is definitely a time-sucker ! You lose the session, the cookies, the password, the settings, the plugins and a lot more than that, the time.

Coming to solution, I use portable firefox personally (if you don’t know what this, check out ProtableApps).

To run parallel firefox versions you just need to make a few changes in the configuration.

1. Goto folder \Other\Source and copy FirefoxPortable.ini to your firefox portable root, where the FireFoxPortable.exe is located.

2. Open the file in editor and change the following line:

AllowMultipleInstances=true

(Basically we are allowing multiple instances of FireFox)

PS1: If you have installed both version of firefox as portable you need to make changes in both the installations. (Simply copy the same FirefoxPortable.ini to other folder.)

Adding new programs to Default Programs

For a week I was facing problem while associating files to open with
some application. Though I was able to locate the application, yet it
didn’t showed up on the open with dialog, like this:

(Here, I browsed for the application. yet it is not appearing here.)

I stumbled across this solution:

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/openwithadd.htm

This nifty utility allows you to add programs to the default programs list thereby allowing you to associate your files with the application of your choice.

Installing Ubuntu 8.04 server on VirtualBox

If you are getting the following error on installing Ubuntu 8.04 server on VirtualBox:

The kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU 0:6
Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU

Then, you need to enable the PAE support for the virtual machine.

Follow the screens:

1. Open the settings for the machine (Ctrl + S).

2. Check the Enable PAE/NX bit.

The computer did not resync because the required time change was too big

Microsoft Windows Vista has a built-in feature to synchronize your machine’s time automatically with global time servers around the world. The service can be scheduled to run automatically and works like charm keeping your system time up-to date, but there’s a tiny catch in here.

If your computer’s clock is async for more than 15 hours, this service will not work for you saying “An error occurred”.

Copy the following code and save it as .reg file, apply it and re-run the synchronization. It will work !

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Config]
"MaxNegPhaseCorrection"=dword:ffffffff
"MaxPosPhaseCorrection"=dword:ffffffff

The above code is also available in pastie @ http://pastie.caboo.se/179732.

Winamp: Enqueue as default action

If you have winamp installed and you have allowed winamp to manage your media file associations then it’s possible to change the default behaviour from ‘play’ to ‘enqueue’, i.e when you double click the file it should enqueue the media file as last item on current playlist rather than playing it.

This feature comes in handy when you have a really large mp3 collection (like I posses ! ) and you find-and-listen songs on runtime. At those peak moments (when your ears are craving for some quality music) right clicking on each file and selecting ‘Enqueue in Winamp’ can be a bit annoying.

How to enable this option:

1. Open Winamp.

2. Press Ctrl + P (to show preferences.)

3. Browse inside General Preferences > File Types

4. Select the option on right that says: “Enqueue files on double click in Windows Explorer (default is unchecked)”

5. Restart Winamp.

6. Try opening some media files and it should enqueue them by defualt.

7. Hoorrray !!!

7.1 An instant update:

I followed my own foot-steps and alas ! I failed to get this working.

Well don’t know the exact reason for this (my be because of vista or may be a bug in winamp 5.3) but I found a way out to get it working. Here it is:

7.2 (Yes, we are still on the same line ) Open Registry Editor.

7.3 Browse to HKCR > Winamp.File > shell

7.4 Change the default value in key from ‘Play’ to ‘Enqueue’

7.5 Hooray finally !

 

Extra’s: If you want to do the same for playlists, do the same for Winamp.Playlist key.

Winamp: Auto tag feature

I wanted to blog about this feature from so long (as it got released with Winamp 5.5 a long way back), but I couldn’t find enough time to do this.This weekend however, I had decided to use this feature heavily to tag almost all of my mp3s and hence I decided to blog about it too.

So what I’m talking about ? Auto-tagging in Winamp 5.5

It’s a new feature introduced in Winamp 5.5 that tags your mp3 files using the Gracenote’s CDDB server. It doesn’t relies on any kind of meta-data present in file, neither it does uses the file name for this purpose. I suspect it sends some kind og hash (that I’ll have to hack around …).But what stands out is that Winamp was even able to tag a file name “dsfdsferfermvmev.mp3″ correctly.

Using this feature you can tag and categorize unused songs in your mp3 archieve.

How to find this feature in Winamp:

There are two ways to use this feature:

1. Double click on the scrolling title(or press Alt-3) to open file info dialog, in bottom right you’ll see Auto-tag button (for tagging a single file).

2. Create a playlist and select files and then right click on them, select send-to and select Auto-tag (for tagging multiple files in one go).

A word of caution:

Nothing is perfect ! so is this. Please keep an eye on the results of the auto-tagging, if you suspect anything wrong don’t apply the tag at all.

Renaming files based on their tags

Now what to do when your files have been tagged, but still their names are like r3rff34f.mp3, well you can use any software available in the market that can rename files based on their tag information or you can use the following ruby-script to rename them.

Click here

Caret browsing in Firefox

Well I really don’t know If this is really a good topic for a post, but I feel it’s really worth so here it is.

How many times we have wanted that we could use our keyboard to select some text from a webpage instead of mouse. Wouldn’t it be better if you could select some text using up-down and shift and could copy the selected part using just Ctrl+C and paste it using Ctrl+V ?

Well I really needed something like this but since it wasn’t too important to talk about so kept it like a lurking desire.

Enter the Caret Browsing feature (particularly in FF, since I am not using IE now), just press F7 and it prompt you that F7 toggles Caret Browsing, click Yes and here you go.

Just click your mouse pointer once inside your webpage and you could do whatever we discussed above.

Try it !

Windows Live Skydrive Beta

Today I used Live Skydrive Beta and it was fun exploring it. The interface was easy to use and was looking cool. Although the space offered by SkyDrive is less now (500 MB only) I expect that might increase once the service is out of beta.

Uploading files was a breeze, either you could upload 5 files at a time using the standard interface or you could download the ActiveX control that allows you to upload any number of files.

One thing where I got stuck was moving files between the folders that feature is currently unavailable and it would be really nice If I could upload many files at one go and could move them around in their respective folders.

Overall it is a good tool and suits users basic file sharing demands. Give it a try !

Link : Live Skydrive Beta

My Drive on SkyDrive : sazwqa’s SkyDrive

Sample test post from MSN Live Writer

Hi all,

• I am writing this post from inside the MSN Live Writer and let’s see what are its capabilities.
• It has a spell-checker inbuilt.
• It automatically customizes your post width according to you weblog.
• Facility to load images. 
• It’s auto numbering feature doesn’t works
• It also provides to add links, like this.
• Ummy, it provides me to view how my blog post will look in real time before posting.(just press F12 for that)
• Lemme insert some tables in it :
  

  this is	a
  sample	table

ok this is a sample block quote

well i can say for sure that i’m impressed by now ! since i hate to goto the live site to write my blogs and now i think i found the easy way out !

 

let’s see if there are any more features to reveal or else shd i commit this post …

ok it has ability to insert map from live.com

 ok that’s all I can find in a 10 minute time and yeah it impresses me a lot … !

So I hope I shall be looking forward a huge community behind this nifty yet time-saver tool.

cya !

 

hey one minute i forgot to tell u where to get this great application .

so here’s the link : download

~rd

Real performance enhancing addons for Firefox

Well there are many addons for the already power packed browser Firefox, but installing to many of them or installing heavy addons that take up huge system resources prove to be of no use at all.

I faced such useless addons in past and I always wished that I could have a standard set of addons that I could install without even thinking once.

So here after a bit of research I got my primitive list of addons, that actually do what they intended to do without taking much of resources and add boastful of utility to the browser.

So here’s the list :

1. del.icio.us Bookmarks – to access and add your bookmarks from browser.
2. PDF Download – to get a nice menu while opening PDF, instead of browser hanging.
3. StumbleUpon – to explore really good stuff from the internet.
4. Firebug – the messiah of web development, normal users can skip this.
5. Adblock Plus – a must, my advice : don’t ever use firefox without it !
6. Web Developer – one more tool for developers, normal users can skip this.

Hope I will be increasing the list shortly !
~rd