School's here again and long-time readers know we are blessed with lab computers that have Zip™ drives, so I like to keep all my stuff there. The last semester or two I haven't spent much time on campus, but with the especially acute parking situation this semester I'm spending all day Tuesday and Thursday on campus (to the point I really wonder if I could cancel home internet... but I'm putting that off) so I can carpool. Anyway I cleaned my Zip disk out the other day; here's a rundown of what I kept:
- putty ssh client: do not leave home without it
- IrfanView image viewer/tinker tool
- doxygen
- UnxUtils: GNU for Windows, or cygwin without the runtime and environment. Even if you don't get UnxUtils, you can get wget 1.8.2 separately.
- LiveJournal client, even though I don't remember my password, so I can't use it--but it's small
- My registered copy of TextPad, though I wonder if I should try Texturizer
- Trillian 0.74, not Pro; I need to figure if I can proxy it over ssh like I do web
- Tulip Chain as occasionally I linkcheck my dmoz category from campus
- Shortcuts to the host machine's My Documents, Command Prompt, and Visual C++
- Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1
The last I've only set up today so I thought I'd note how I did it.
- Get and unzip Firebird 0.6.1. This semester the machines are totally locked down and we can only write to My Documents--but that's sufficient.
- Move the MozillaFirebird folder to d:\programs. D: is the Zip drive on these machines.
- Make two shortcuts. I use the Zip disk's root as a menu of sorts, with a bunch of shortcuts and only two folders, data and programs. So in the root I have a shortcut to d:\programs\MozillaFirebird\MozillaFirebird.exe, and another shortcut that's the same with the -p option. The -p option starts the Profile Manager, so obviously enough that shortcut is named "Firebird Profile Manager."
- Run the Profile Manager. Create a new profile with your name, but--and this is the important part you'd never get a chance to do if you simply ran Firebird--select d:\programs\MozillaFirebird folder for the profile folder. This puts all your configuration on the Zip disk instead of in Documents and Settings.
- Set up Firebird as you like. For me this means:
- Options: 0 day history, save neither forms nor passwords, cookies for this session only,
5000 KB cache (that's one fewer zero than the defaultI had been using 5000 KB but it did seem to thrash the Zip drive in cases), disable Java, and don't allow JavaScript to move, resize, raise, or lower windows, nor hide the status bar. - Fonts: Palatino Linotype for serif and Franklin Gothic Medium for sans, though I admit they don't look as nice without subpixel font rendering. But what does?
- Manual proxy configuration: I use ssh port forwarding to tunnel all my browsing through an ssh 2 session. I don't trust Network Services not to spy. For that matter these machines could have key loggers on them, though Task Manager and the WinTasks Process Library tells me there are no software key loggers running.
- Theme: Phoenity Orbit.
- Extensions: Flash Click To View, Live HTTP Headers, PrefButtons, and RadialContext, which is hard to use at first but gets easier, and I've built up motor memory for a few basic options so I half need it now.
- Toolbars set up like this. The checkboxes come from the PrefButtons extension. I use about:config to change browser.throbber.url to "javascript:stop()", so I can click the throbber instead of a separate Stop button. I may remove the History and Bookmarks buttons, since I automatically hit ctrl-H for History anyway; I don't have them on the bar at home. Also, at home I use this Firebird Help trick to set the search box "100" wide; the actual box ends up 160-odd px for some reason.
- More about:config:
- accessibility.typeaheadfind.linksonly: false
- browser.block.target_new_window: true
- browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing: false
- browser.related.enabled: false
- browser.tabs.autohide: false
- browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace: false
- dom.disable_window_open_feature.menubar: true
- dom.disable_window_open_feature.minimizable: true
- dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable: true
- dom.disable_window_open_feature.scrollbars: true
- dom.disable_window_open_feature.status: true
- dom.disable_window_open_feature.titlebar: true
- image.animation_mode: none
- layout.frames.force_resizability: true
- Lastly, I have a "to read" folder in the Bookmark Toolbar. While I'm reading RSS or whatever, I'll try to drag links to it instead of opening tabs. I usually have enough tabs open as it is; I might as well save those links for later serial viewing, since they'd end up there when saving tabs to bookmarks after my session anyway.
- Options: 0 day history, save neither forms nor passwords, cookies for this session only,
- When you move to a new machine, run the Firebird Profile Manager first. Create a new profile with the same name and folder (the Firebird folder); it won't overwrite the existing configuration. If no one else ran Firebird on that machine before
the Profile Manager, yours will be the only profile on the machine, so you won't even get the popup asking which profile to start. It'll just start your shiny preconfigured Firebird off your shiny preconfigured Zip™ disk.
Comments
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Cute. :)
Personally I use metapad for most text stuff, and .. god, for some reason I use Jed for anything that benefits from syntax highlighting. It’s mostly a bad habit really - I only use it for the emacs keybindings. I should invest some attention in xKeymacs or something.
Finally, I’ve got the plain old All-in-one gestures extension for firebird, with everything but gestures switched off. I so lazy. For the rest of windows, I run StrokeIt which, despite its stupid name is a pretty neat tool. It learns your own mouse idiolect and you can configure just about any crazy gesture to trigger one or more keystrokes. The gestures I use ubiquitously are: right-left-right (to close the current window), down (to minimize windows), and left and right for back and forward in Internet Explorer. I keep winamp 2 windowshaded at the top of the screen with the alphablend plugin, and use left & right for back and forward (so you can just throw the cursor to the top of the screen and right-drag to do stuff), and down to un-windowshade.
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Ooh, that does sound useful for Winamp. What I really want are global keyboard controls for Winamp—and now I remember I was playing with Windows hooks recently to mimic an OS X feature, so if I wanted I could probably make a wee app to do it, though I bet there are already a billion and three if I’d look. Win-Z through Win-B to control Winamp would be nice, if a little cramped to use left-Win.
Here in a couple hours I’ll have Texturizer to try. If you saw the entry on syntax coloration in nano, it’s turned out to be much harder than I first thought, at least to get the multiline “”“heredoc”“” strings. I still haven’t figured it out. It’s like if the start and end are the same (three quotes), it’s not smart enough to realize the end is the end, and starts coloring a new heredoc there. Ugh.
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I know I’m kinda late with this feedback; I found the article through a web search.
Anyhow, I know of a way that you can eliminate the per-machine profile setup. It’s not ideal, but it would work. In your D:\programs\MozillaFirebird directory, you would write a batch file called firebird.bat that would look like this:
SET USERPROFILE=D:\data MozillaFirebird
Then make your shortcut point to that batch file. That way, Mozilla Firebird would put the profile in “D:\data\Application Data\Phoenix”, instead of “C:\Documents and Settings…”. The downside is that a command prompt window would open briefly when you run the batch file. Anybody know of a better way to achieve the same result?
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Ooh, cool tip. I suppose you could set the shortcut “Start Minimized.” Also you might write a tiny program that sets the environment variable then starts Firebird, but that seems a bit much.
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I tried setting USERPROFILE, on Win2000 but the file open/save dialogs refused to open after that. It seems to really confuse the common dialogs for some reason.
On the plus side I found if I create shortcut for “d:\programs\MozillaFirebird\MozillaFirebird.exe -pMe” the profile manager will only launch if I haven’t setup the “Me” profile on that machine before. No need for two shortcuts.
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Two problems with trying to run FireFox from a removable disk, as documented here and on the FireFox Tips & Tricks page http://www.texturizer.net/firefox/tips.html#oth_usb using this batch file:
==== set myRootPath=\Setup set USERPROFILE=%myRootPath% set APPDATA=%USERPROFILE%\Application Data
start %USERPROFILE%\Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe %1 %2 %3First, you MUST have the rights to create a [Phoenix] directory under %WinDir% or you can’t even run FireFox from the removable drive. I just tried it, and if I log in as a “user” (as opposed to a PowerUser or Administrator) I can’t run on a new computer until I’ve set up the “%windir%\Phoenix” directory as a more-powerful user first.
(Aside: it seems to me that FireFox needs a command-line option that allows it to specify the parent directory for registry.dat and pluginreg.dat; as it is right now those are either in %APPDATA%\Phoenix (dcefault setup) or %WinDir%\Phoenix (this batch setup), which ties them to a particular computer …)
Second, the file “pluginreg.dat” (which is created in the user’s %appdata%\Phoenix directory under normal circumstances and in %windir%\Phoenix under this batch-file) contains hard-coded paths to all the plugins on a given machine, which can include non-standard paths for people who have installed in non-standard paths (e.g. plugins like this “c:\adobe\reader5\Reader\browser\nppdf32.dll” or this “C:\NETSCAPE\Comm478\Program\Plugins\npdrmv2.dll”). That means your “portable” installation won’t work unless each and every machine has identical setups.
Seems to me that FireFox needs to be made entirely OS-independent; the location of registry.dat and pluginreg.dat need to be under the control of the individual setup NOT hard-wired, and either the plug-ins need to be kept under the FireFox install directory OR their needs to be a command-line option to force FireFox to locate them dynamically at program startup (at the known expense of slower start-times, of course, for those who need the portability).