30 April, 2011


Automobile Upholstery Decorator

When I was a kid, before anyone had ever heard of a "DC Power Outlet", we still had great gadgets with which to occupy our time, while waiting for Mom to emerge from the liquor store with a carton of Salem Lights.

Cleaning the garage today, I found such a toy. I remember my Mom's excitement when I fashioned a Micky Mouse head and an Olympic symbol on the back seat of her '65 Mustang. She taught me some new adjectives that day, and if you'd known my mom, you would know how impressive that really was.

14 April, 2011

Now Retired Blog Header

Often waxing techno-sophical, he dreams someone might stumble across his words, engendering a one-way feed from his mind to theirs, a mild viral form of e-progeny. In reality, few will visit, and those who do will not do so again. At least he can imagine he'll leave a legacy. The aliens that some day discover Google's ancient, crystal storage units will, upon rubbing their eyes in exhaustion, skip it.

02 April, 2011

Running Multiple Versions of Firefox on one PC

I decided that I wanted to update to Firefox 4 and yet also not yet have to upgrade my RoboForm (see prior posting) password/identity manager. Thus, I needed a means by which to run multiple versions of Firefox on the same PC.

I accomplished this by creating a new Firefox profile (called Dan_v3.6x), and then re-installing Firefox 3.6, in a separate folder, creating a shortcut, to the 3.6 executable, and adding an argument, after the shortcut's target location, to use the 3.6 profile when running the 3.6 executable.

I can now run both Firefox 4 and Firefox 3.6 on the same PC. The catch is that only one version can be running simultaneously, but it works great. [Note that if one tries to launch the other version, while one version is still running, the system will simply launch another window of the same version.]

So now, when I absolutely need my RoboForm information, it's there, but when I want the Firefox 4 experience, I can have that too.

Steps:


  • Create a new Firefox profile
  • Run the Firefox Profiler Manager via the command prompt (or via creating a shortcut) as follows:
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -Profilemanager
  • Install Firefox 3.6 into a custom folder via the 'Custom' installation option. I suggest the following:
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox _3.6x
  • Create a shortcut to Firefox 3.6. exactly as follows, including quotes:
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox _3.6x\firefox.exe" -P "Dan_v3.6x"
The key to the above steps to work is that one needs to create a new profile, in Firefox 4, prior to installing the older version.

Downloading Older Firefox Versions:

To download Firefox 3.6 or other older Firefox versions, go here:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/ .

Jump to

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/3.6.16-candidates/build1/win32/en-US/

for the Win32 version if you're a Windows 32-bit user.