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Removing Google from Firefox’s Awesome Address Bar Search

Sunday, May 15th, 2011
Posted in Software · Tags: ,

If you didn’t know already, Firefox lets you search from the Awesome Bar (the address bar) and it uses Google by default. So if you were to type “test” in the Awesome Bar, it will look in your bookmarks and/or browser history (depending on your settings). And as long as you do not select an option you can just hit enter and it will do a Google search. So in a sense you can use the search box for something besides Google. But let’s say you might want to open this search in another tab, if so press Alt – Enter and you won’t even lose what was typed in the address bar previously.

Anyway, let’s remove Google as the default search engine. So in the Awesome Bar type in
about:config and press Enter. You will get a warning from Firefox, but let’s go ahead and click “I’ll be careful, I promise!”. You will see a lot of settings in here; However, let’s make sure this feature is enabled first. So in the Filter textfield type keyword.enabled and you should see only one line show up for keyword.enabled, if you double-click this line it will toggle the value between true and false. Make sure it is set to true.

Now lets type in keyword.URL in the Filter textfield and now you should see just the line pertaining to keyword.URL. So double-click it and it will pop up a dialog box asking for the new string value
It probably has Google by default with this URL

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=

Let’s change that and depending what search engine you want to use type one of the following:

For DuckDuckGo (non SSL)

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=

For DuckDuckGo (SSL)

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=

For Yahoo!

http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&p=

For Bing

http://www.bing.com/search?q=

For Ask

http://www.ask.com/web?q=

and then press OK. Then you can close the tab and you are good to go.

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Portable Filezilla for Mac OS X

Thursday, April 7th, 2011
Posted in Software · Tags:

Here’s how you can make FileZilla work off a USB flash drive in Mac OS X.

First download the version of FileZilla for OS X, then extract it and you will then have a FileZilla.app file. Put this where you want it on your USB thumb drive.

Now right click FileZilla.app and pick Show Package Contents.

Copy docs/fzdefaults.xml.example into Contents/SharedSupport/ and rename to fzdefaults.xml

Now open fzdefaults.xml and change the line that says

<Setting name="Config Location">$SOMEDIR/filezilla/</Setting>

to
<Setting name="Config Location">.</Setting>
and save.

That will make it put any configuration files it uses in the same folder as that XML file in Contents/SharedSupport/

You can also delete everything in <Servers> in that file, otherwise they wont be deletable. It has an example for a “predefined” ftp server that can never be removed other than by deleting them in the XML file.

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What Flash needs

Thursday, April 7th, 2011
Posted in Software · Tags:

I’d like to see Flash add the option on the export options for JPEG and GIF to allow us to pick what frame to pick when it creates the image. If anything even first frame or last frame would be better than always just doing the first frame. The ability for us to figure out the size of the file or possibly set a maximum size limit would be nice as well. Surely Adobe knows many people build ads in Flash and are required to have a backup image as well. This would help save time from having to load the SWF, printscreen the last frame and then optimize it in Photoshop so its under 20kb. While they are at it, why not add a PNG option as well, its 2011 afterall.

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VMware ThinApp

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010
Posted in Software

If you aren’t sure exactly what VMware ThinApp does or how it can be of use to you continue reading. Have you ever wanted to have an portable application, but it wasn’t made that way. With VMware ThinApp you can make virtual apps without the operating system. Then you can put the application on a flash drive or move it onto whatever machine you want, such as a laptop when you are on a trip and copy it back to your main PC when you are done. You can also setup a portable application of some software that only worked with an older version of Windows, some other OS or a very specific configuration.

You have to first create a Virtual Machine with a clean install of whatever OS you need for the applications you will make into virtual applications. They recommend you do not install any anti-virus or firewall or any other programs on the VM; therefore, you’ll want to disable any networking for the VM (and I would also disable any of it inside the OS). I don’t even bother with any updates other than making sure I have the latest Service Packs (SP3 for Windows XP) and possibly any .NET framework installations. Then you install VMware ThinApp on the VM. I would recommend to save a snapshot afterwards, which is possible if you use VMware Workstation. The reason for that is so you can restore the VM back to a clean slate without any programs installed. Now before you install the application you wish to turn into a virtual app, you need to run VMware ThinApp so it can analyze the OS and see what is on the machine. If you want you can create another snapshot after doing it does the analyzation. Once it is done analyzing, minimize but don’t close VMware ThinApp and now then you can install whatever application you want to turn into a portable app. Note, that if you are using an application that needs the .NET Framework you will of course have to install it in the VM. Once your program is done installing, then you unminimize VMware ThinApp and have it reanalyze the changes on the computer. It may take a long time depending on how big the program you installed was. Once it is done it will come up and give you some options on what executables to keep and so on.

Then you can tell it to build the application. Once this is done, copy over the files onto your host OS or save on a USB or Flash drive. You now have a Virtual Application that will let you run the app anywhere you like without the virtual OS.

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Why can’t we tab through code hints?

Friday, July 9th, 2010
Posted in Software

I’ve tried every major code editor out there (and a few text editors) and none of them let you tab through the code completion hints.

I’ve tried the following:

None of them support this! The only editor that ever did support this was Aptana and they gave up on PHP.

Why do I have to move my hand from where I am typing to the arrow keys or to my mouse and select an option. Why not let us tab through the list of choices? This is clearly a better approach to UX (user experience). Firefox and IE both allow you to do this from the URL box. And I wrote about how to configure Opera to allow tabbing through the URL bar. Unfortunately Google Chrome and Safari don’t support it.

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