The Reasons

1. You need to store different cookies for the same website. (What is cookie?) As to myself, I've got two Google accounts, and I want Firefox to remember both of them.
2. You share your computer with someone else.
3. Since the more addons you have installed, the slower Firefox becomes. Using separate profiles, you can install plugins for specific tasks in each profile.

The Solution

There are instructions on solving this problem with the Profile Manager plugin, such as this tutorial by Ross McKillop. However, what I'm going to describe here is a simpler solution.

1. Modify the shortcut to firefox.exe. Mine had an argument "-profile 'path\to\the\profile\folder'", then I added the argument "no-remote" and it became "-no-remote -profile 'path\to\the\profile\folder'".
2. Create a new folder where fits, which will be your new profile container.
3. Create a new shortcut to your firefox.exe with the command line arguments "-no-remote –profile 'path\to\the\new\profile\container'".

All set & start to enjoy two Firefox instances at the some. You'll see that the whole point of this method is the command line argument "no-remote", which enables Firefox to run with multiple profiles. You can find an incomplete list of Firefox command line arguments here.

Related posts:

1. How to Change the UI Language of Firefox
2. Several Firefox Features You Should Know
3. Yoono - SNS All in One in Your Firefox Sidebar

As we know, Windows Live products can only be installed on specific OS like Windows XP SP2 or later, or Windows Vista. Unfortunately, I'm currently running Windows 2003 Server on my laptop for development reasons, which does not meet the system requirements for Windows Live components.

There're workarounds for this, and I'm introducing to you the most simple one: use the MSI installers and the system requirements check will be bypassed.

Download

• Grab the Windows Live Writer 2009 Build 14.0.8050.1202(MSI)
• Show me the Windows Live Messenger 2009 beta Build 9.0.1407.1107(MSI)

Notes

1. Other components like Toolbar, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker are not so popular, so they're not provided here.
2. No prompt or notification dialog will show during the installation. Don't worry, go straight to Start –> Programs –> Windows Live, and you'll find them.
3. No entries will be added to the Add/Remove Programs panel, so you can not get them uninstalled there. Right click the MSI installer and you'll see the commands Install, Repair and Uninstall. Do whatever you want here.

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Features include:

• Customizable colors all around in a theme option page
• Admin shortcuts on the homepage
• Highlight author comments
• Separated comments and trackbacks/pingbacks
• And more

Plugins supported:

• WP 2.3 Related Posts (similar plugins are also supported with a little modification to the sidebar.php file)
• WP-PageNavi
• WP-PostViews
• Clean Archives Reloaded
• Get Recent Comments
• Subscribe to Comments

Download:

Current version 2.7.3 of Always Twitting can be downloaded here.

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Here is the first one, about Redirection and Validation. It’s pretty simple, or, I should say amateur. You got it, amateur is who I am. ^^

I encountered this problem that, Okay, here comes the

Problem Description

I’ve got a Button object with OnClick Event in page1, which, when clicked, Response.Redirect to page2. Meanwhile, I have some Validator objects in page1, too. The thing is, the client-side Validation occurs before even reaching the Event for the Button. That is to say, the Validators prevent Redirection from happening.

Solution

You'll love this because it’s so easy. In the Button's properties list, find "CausesValidation" and set it to false. That’s it.

My thought is, there’s always some property control if an operation is generated on the server-side.

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Juice is an intelligent discovery engine that integrates seamlessly with Firefox. It has features like:

• discovering deep-linked content
• multi-task while browsing
• media storage and organization

Highlight and move a chunk of text, and Juice directly delivers a set of rich, relevant content to you.

Drag & Drop

It’s easy to use Juice and feel its magic. Just grab a chunk of text, image or video and Juice will start performing its tricks. When dropping text into Juice, Juice will try to understand its meaning and serve you with context-relevant information. In the case of images or videos, it will let you store them for later viewing, while you keep browsing just the way you like!

Intelligent Discovery Engine

The developers didn’t use the term search here in order to distinguish Juice from other search engines. Juice digs into the keywords and looks for more info in various formats.

Juice's discovery mechanism is grounded on Linkool Labs' proprietary intelligent discovery engine. This engine, comprised of a natural language processing system and a dictionary management system, helps to evolve the semantic web by connecting keywords with the most relevant, rich content from third-party web services.

Discover & Organize

The use these two words as a combination not individuals, just like Drag & Drop. Because you can bookmark and organize rich content discovered for you! For example, when Juice delivers a video to you, you can simply add the video into your personal video playlist – for current or future viewing! You can also do this with the videos and images you discover yourself while browsing the web, by dragging the image or tab attached to the videos.

Take a look at the video below to see how Juice works as if by magic:

This article is part 2 of the 2-part series Make Full Use of Your Firefox Side Space, discussing excellent Firefox extensions to fill out the side spaces of wide-screen monitor. For part 1 of the series, refer to Yoono - SNS All in One in Your Firefox Sidebar.

Related posts:

1. Yoono - SNS All in One in Your Firefox Sidebar
2. Several Firefox Features You Should Know
3. How to Change the UI Language of Firefox

Strictly speaking, Yoono does not take over the sidebar space or resides in the sidebar, and it is just positioned at the left side of your Firefox, which means, normal sidebar elements like “Bookmarks” and “History” can be shown with Yoono at the same time.

There’re a bunch of widgets that you can use to integrate almost everything into Yoono, including:

Friends to

• gather your friends from all social networks and IM services
• see your friends’ status and be alerted of their updates
• filter and prioritize your friends’ updates
• change your status and send direct messages to your friends
• drag & drop photos and videos directly into and IM session

Supported networks & IM: facebook, myspace, imeem, twitter, flickr, friendfeed, piczo, msn, aim, gtalk, yahoo.

Discoveries to

• get recommendations of sites similar to the one you’re currently browsing
• find users who share the same interests
• sort by site, people or tags

Web Notes to

• drag & drop text, videos, pictures directly in web notes
• classify your web notes: love, rant, laugh or your own online files
• share it with all Yoono users, your friends, a list of friends or keep it private
• send your web notes through Yoono or post them directly to your blog

Videos to

• get recommendations of videos related to the site you’re surfing
• see your friends’ favorite videos
• get a selection of videos from major video sharing sites
• search for videos directly from Yoono
• drag & drop all videos to your friends

Photos to

• get recommendations of pictures related to the site you’re surfing
• see your friends’ photos
• get a selection of pictures from major photo sharing sites
• search for photos directly from Yoono
• drag & drop any photos to your friends

Music to

• choose a radio station
• listen to free radio while surfing: no pop-up window, no track download
• search and file radio stations by type of music or preferences

News to

• manage all your subscriptions and social news
• get all your feeds right in the sidebar
• check to see what your friends are digging
• share, email and add notes to stories

Supported: googlereader, digg

Mail to

• toggle between messages and refresh your inbox
• easily flip between email accounts
• add or remove accounts
• preview your attachments right in the sidebar

Supported: gmail, yahoo

Shopping to

• choose between major retailers and second-hand bargains
• rank by price, category and stores
• run direct search for any product

This article is part 1 of the 2-part series Make Full Use of Your Firefox Side Space, discussing excellent Firefox extensions to fill out the side spaces of wide-screen monitor. For part 2 of the series, refer to Juice – Intelligent Discovery Engine in Your Firefox Sidebar.

Related posts:

1. Juice - Intelligent Discovery Engine in Your Firefox Sidebar
2. Several Firefox Features You Should Know
3. How to Run Different Firefox Profiles Simultaneously the Easy Way

When you encounter this problem and you google around, you’ll probably notice a Firefox preference general.useragent.locale quickly. Then you change the value of this parameter as what is told, but nothing happens when you restart Firefox.

Why’s that? To find out the reason, we have to dig deeper into the concept user agent and locale. The user agent string is a piece of text which identifies the name and version of a given browser. It is used by websites to determine which browser you use. That is to say, the user agent is your browser’s identity. The current locale in use by Mozilla is stored in the preference general.useragent.locale, and a variety of components consult it for localization information. Remember when you visit YouTube for the first time and the page prompts you for the language you are using intelligently? Oh yeah, that’s the magic generated by our user agent string. You get it now, simply altering this preference just changes how your browser identifies itself, not necessarily  its appearance.

Hence what you need essentially to get a different UI language is the language pack, besides changing this preference. A language pack is an extension that changes the language of the user interface in a Mozilla application. Alternatively, you can assign a different user-interface language to each command or icon that you use to start the Mozilla application. For example, to use French you can specify either: -uilocale fr or -uilocale fr-FR. On a Windows system the entire command might look something like:

C:Program FilesMozillaThunderbirdthunderbird.exe -uilocale fr

To download the language packs, visit

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/your-firefox-version/win32/xpi

In my case, that is

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0.5/win32/xpi

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1. Several Firefox Features You Should Know
2. How to Run Different Firefox Profiles Simultaneously the Easy Way
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The Scene

If you are playing with domain hack as I am, one thing to think about is to redirect the visitors reaching the primary domain to the sub-domain. For instance, I want to make sure whoever visits "http://icio.us" gets redirected to "http://del.icio.us" properly.

How do we do that? The answer varies depending on the method we take. I'm introducing a way which takes advantage of the mod_rewrite feature of apache servers.

The Solution

The relative paths look something like this:

/ <- http://icio.us

/del/ <- http://del.icio.us

Establish a .htaccess file in the root directory with content below:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteRule ^(.*) http://del.icio.us/$1 [R,L]
</IfModule>

This way each request to "http://icio.us" will be redirected to "http://del.icio.us". Follow the htaccess tutorial and modify RewriteRule to create more complicated redirection rules as you wish.

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In the following paragraphs, I made a summary of formatting DateTime object in several circumstances to get it displayed as needed:

• Format DateTime string retrieved from database and to be binded to Data Controls.
  
  <ASP:BoundColumn DataField="JoinTime" DataFormatString="{0:yyyy-MM-dd}" >
  </ASP:BoundColumn>
  <ASP:BoundColumn DataField="CheckoutTime" DataFormatString="{0:yyyy-MM-dd HH24:mm:ss}">
  </asp:BoundColumn>

• Statement in the CodeFile to get a DateTime string.
  
  e.Item.Cell[0].Text = Convert.ToDateTime(e.Item.Cell[0].Text).ToShortDateString();

• With the help of String class.
  
  String.Format( "yyyy-MM-dd ", theDateTimeObj);

• With the help of Convert method.
  
  Convert.ToDateTime("2008-12-09").ToString;
  Convert.ToDateTime(dr["PubDate"]).ToShortDateString();

• ToString method of DateTime class.
  
  DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyyMMddhhmmss");
  DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy/MM/dd hh:mm:ss");

• Show only year and month.
  
  DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,"starttime","{0:yyyy-MM}");

Certainly, there are more situations when you have to format a DateTime object, and the rules could be deduced from above.

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CPU: Intel Quad6600
Motherboard: ASUS P5Q Pro
Memory: Kingston DDR2 800 2G x4
Hard Disk: Seagate 1.5TB
Video Adapter: Galaxy 9800GTX+
Power Supply: Thermaltake W3030
Case: Thermaltake Armor+
Keyboard: Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000

Everything seems to work well, except, err… the hard disk. Rumor has it that Seagate 1.5T with the model ST31500341AS has a bug that, while running low speed writing/reading task, it halts randomly. The bad news is, my 1.5T is without exception.

Phenomenon

When I watch some .avi video, the playing process ceases at some random point and the hard disk LED indicator starts flashing endlessly. After a while, everything becomes normal as if nothing ever happened.

Detail Info

Hard disk model: ST31500341AS
Firmware version: SD19
Video player: Windows Media Player, Media Player Classic
Video codec: XviD
Operating System: Windows Vista Ultimate x64

Solution – firmware update

Seagate gave out a new version of firmware some time ago, but not publicly. You have to contact discsupport@seagate.com for this update. If you can’t wait and want to update the firmware right now, follow the steps below AT YOUR OWN RISK:

1. Download the SD1A firmware in ISO format.
2. Burn the ISO to a disc. Since the disk is bootable, change the boot device priority in your BIOS & set the first one to CDROM.
3. Detach all the PATA and SATA devices except the hard disk you’re going to update. IDE device is safe during the process, so you can leave it there.
4. Restart your computer and the disc will be loaded & run automatically.
5. A readme text file will be displayed at first, press ESC or F10 to exit and enter the command-line environment.
6. Enter “S” to select the “scan for ATA devices” command and make sure there is only one device found.
7. Enter “A” to download the firmware, whose version is SD1A. The update process will start automatically. DO keep the power on during the whole procedure or the hard disk will be damaged permanently.
8. When everything is done, press any key and the system will shut down. Power on again and that’s it. DO NOT Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart, power off or press any key as what is told in the instruction.

Looks like a long story but it is simple when you do it yourself. I’ve done it myself and tested the hard disk with firmware SD1A. The bug does go away. If you’ve got any doubts or questions, feel free to contact and I’ll see what I can help.

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