The Day Today

At home I use iTunes on my Macbook to listen to music, and I’ve become a regular user of the keyboard shortcuts for controlling playback (pause/resume, previous track, next track, volume, etc). At work I can listen to my iTunes library using my portable drive, but as I’m using Windows and have a basic keyboard I don’t have these dedicated keys to control my music. This is frustrating because there’s even more need for this quick control at work, especially pausing the current song when my attention is required.

A few quick Google searches helped me to solve this issue using a small application called iTunes Hotkeys. You’ll need the free .NET framework before it’ll work but it sits in the system tray and responds to keyboard shortcuts such as (pause). It’s not quite a one key solution but it doesn’t take long for the shortcuts to become second nature. It will even launch iTunes for you if it’s not already running.

I’ve added a shortcut to Hotkeys on my desktop and assigned a keyboard shortcut to launch it. I could have it in Startup but I wont always want iTunes launching when I switch the workstation on.

Continuing the current trend of short posts, here are some cool fonts, one of which I used for my online photo gallery. I’m quickly using up all of my draft entries with a single hyperlink in, so you can expect a decent length post again soon!

I’ve been saving this for a lazy day, and I almost forgot to post today so check out these cool free icons at Smashing Magazine. Hopefully I’ll be back to the full length posts next week!

I’ve been having an issue with Mozilla Firefox for some time now, where I can’t start it multiple times. Opening a new window is fine, but attempting to launch from a shortcut results in the error “Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.” I determined some time ago that this was related to my profile and that sorting out a fresh one would resolve the issue (copying the profile failed to do this).

So it is until now that I have delayed the deletion of my profile and creation of a new one, mainly because it didn’t bother me too much. The thing that finally pushed me to do this is that after a recent cleanup of my machine, Firefox has become unstable. I have now uninstalled/reinstalled and am ready to get this profile mess sorted. Removing the profile will of course cause me to lose any information stored, including passwords (I keep these in my head anyway so not a problem), bookmarks, and extensions.

I have the bookmarks covered using Google Browser Sync (which can also syncronise cookies, passwords, history, and open tabs) but there are a few other extensions that I find essential and will need reinstalling in the new profile. I did look at using FEBE to backup all extensions so I can just restore them in the new profile, but I prefer to use moments like this to perform a cleanup - so I’ll be getting rid of almost as many extensions that I seldom use.

Below I have listed my essential extensions, along with a description and a link to the download location. This is really so I can refer to this list to perform the reinstallation, and is in a way my backup of extensions.

1. ColorZilla - Adds a eyedropper tool to the status bar, allowing you to get the hex value of any colour displayed on a page. A very useful tool for website designers.
2. Extended Statusbar - This adds useful information to the status bar such as image count, page size, and how long the page took to load.
3. Faviconize Tab - I don’t use this much (because I forget I have it) but it’s great. You can double click any tab and it will reduce to only display the site’s favicon - a great space saver if you use lots of tabs.
4. Firebug - XHTML/CSS/Javascript debugging tool. Absolutely essential!
5. Google Browser Sync - Essential for syncronising my bookmarks between machines. If only the bookmarks appeared on Google Bookmarks so I could access them online (apparently this is on the todo list).
6. Google Notebook - A handy place to keep notes such as flight numbers, and other reference codes. I often forget I have it though, and most of these details get e-mailed to me anyway.
7. Greasemonkey - This allows user scripts to run any website, which can be very handy. I used to have a script that added RSS feeds to Google Mail but I stopped using it, now I only have Facebook Autopoke (that’s right - I only poke because it’s automatic - now you feel less special?)
8. IETab - Great for testing sites in Internet Explorer without loading it up, this allows you to change the rendering engine for any tab to IE. It’s also handy for sites that wont work in Firefox such as Outlook Web Access, or my work’s Intranet - you can configure sites to load using IETab by default.
9. LiveHTTPHeaders - Shows what conversations happen between Firefox and the visited site(s). This can be handy for debugging problems or investigating site security.
10. StumbleUpon - Essential for those moments where you think you’ve read the entire Internet already. Hit the Stumble button (after configuring your preferences) and you’ll get a seemingly random site displayed. Once you’re bored of that site, rate it and hit the button again!
11. SwitchProxy - I use this all the time to avoid the proxy server at work, basically it routes all your traffic through another server. This can be very handy for security purposes.
12. User Agent Switcher - This lets you tell Firefox to masquerade as another user agent. Sometimes it’s useful to pretend to be Googlebot for example, and see the web as Google see it.
13. Web Developer - Lets you deconstruct and diagnose problems within a website. This one is essential if you consider yourself a web developer.

Of course this list wouldn’t be complete without including my own Firefox extension! It’s called the iCONSULT Search Assistant and unfortunately it’s not publically available, but even if it was it probably wouldn’t be on many people’s essential list! It basically adds a context menu item to perform a lookup against Elsevier’s Clinical Decision Support tool.

For details on managing Firefox profiles see Firefox Help: How To Manage Profiles.

Update: Everything reinstalled and I still have the same Firefox error. D’oh! Any suggestions would be cool, but I’m not that worried as I wont have this machine for much longer, and this was a good excercise.

A while ago I took a Brainbench certification for a prospective employer. The test was paid for by the company, and although I didn’t get offered the job, I can be satisfied that I passed the test with a really good score. This means that without having to pay for it, I had gained a new certification to put on my CV and as a side effect ended up on the Brainbench mailing list, which is how I found out about a limited time offer to take more certifications for free.

Until 30th September, Brainbench are offering 20 of their tests for free. I’ve already taken a couple more and will certainly take all those that are appropriate to my career. I feel it’s important to continue skill development and to test your skills on at least an annual basis.

Birmingham (UK) based web developer Mark James from famfamfam.com likes to relax by creating cute icons and giving them away for free! I’ve used them in the past for a non-profit making project, and will definately return in the future. I may even use them for my upcoming Facebook application!