I’ve griped about how slow Firefox can get, especially when loaded down with my standard trio of GMail, GCal and RTM, plus a few other tabs. I was struggling with this again the other day and happened to come across this post referring to the Mozilla Prism project, which allows you to run individual web apps (like GMail, GCal and RTM) in a separate instance of Firefox, without all the browser “chrome” of menus and toolbars. Giving the app its own window restores these web apps (that have taken the place of traditional desktop apps) to primacy in the desktop UI navigation – you can use windows Alt-Tab application switching instead of mucking around with Firefox tabs. And as a massive side benefit, each Prism webapp is a separate instance of Firefox, which means that GMail runs 5x faster itself, and doesn’t slow down all my other browser sessions. There are a couple of issues (the GMail compose field stops working once in a while, the right-mouse menus are missing, links don’t open in ‘main’ browser session), but I love the idea, and it’s working well for me.

Followup after today’s MacWorld keynote: Interestingly (to some, I suppose), this desktop/web app issue is one of my little gripes with my new iPhone: I don’t really feel like I’m using all of what I paid for, since I’m using gMail, gCal and RTM instead of the built-in Mail, Calendar and Tasks (wait a second, is there no built-in tasks application?!?), and those don’t appear on the iPhone desktop, nor are they integrated with each other or the iPhone OS. Today’s iPhone 1.1.3 firmware update does for the iPhone more or less exactly what Prism does for Windows, letting you create desktop icons for bookmarked web apps. I still wish I could sync the calendar with gCal and the notes with something (anything!).

Matt was raving about how great the latest release of Ubuntu Linux is, and I thought it might be good to try it out before spending a bunch of money to switch to MacOS, so I decided to install it on my main Windows XP desktop in a dual-boot setup. Should be easy, right?

Yeah, right.

First of all, even though Ubuntu comes nicely packaged up, if you do a quick search for “dual boot Ubuntu Windows XP” you get a ton of very technical explanations of how to accomplish what should be a built-in option in the installer.

As it turns out, I managed to blow away the Windows Master Boot Record (MBR). Not only that, but since I had failed to install the Linux boot manager (GRUB) correctly, neither OS would boot. Luckily, I could still boot from the Linux CD that I had created, and I also had two other PC’s in the house (although neither of them have a CD-R drive). Looking at this page, I saw that perhaps if I could get to the pre-boot GRUB command line, I could tell GRUB to “chainload” and get through to Windows, even without the “Master Boot Record”…

As is typical, the instructions weren’t quite right, but I deciphered them and managed to make it work. The page says do this: rootnoverify(0,0) chainloader +1 boot

And what I had to do was this: rootnoverify (hd0,1) chainloader +1 boot

Which is close, but how is the average Joe supposed to figure that out? Anyhow, that got me back into Windows. Now I just had to figure out how to restore the MBR. Googling that led here, which essentially says that you have to run the Windows Recovery Console, which of course is only available is you have an original Windows XP SP2 CD, which of course I don’t have.

Or do I? I do have an SP2 disk that Dell sent me a while back… But the computer won’t boot off that CD… I search windows help for “Recovery Console” and it tells me that I can install Recovery Console to be run off the hard drive by doing this: E:\I386\WINNT32.EXE /cmdcons

That appears to work, when I run it from the copy of XP2 on the Dell CD. Now I just have to get to the right boot menu… to do that I have to go through the GRUB chainloader thing again, but then there it is… and now it wants the “Administrator” password. Ha. So I suppose have to go back into Windows itself, reset the Administrator password, and then go back into the Recovery Console. Each of these reboots takes 3-5 minutes, of course.

And I’m finally in the magical Recovery Console. Wow. And fixmbr exists, and produces the expected terrifying warning message, accompanied by a promising “The new master boot record has been successfully written.” I started to run fixboot also, but the warning message scared me off, and as it turned out, I didn’t need to.

So, I reboot again, and it appears that the Windows MBR was in fact restored, and I can boot Windows again.

Great, now how to get back to the copy of Linux that I installed 4 hours ago? Useless. Better to trash that install (delete those partitions), and try again fresh.

…that didn’t work… The Linux installer doesn’t seem to know where to put GRUB to make it work. By now I gather that (it appears that) GRUB is supposed to install itself on the MBR and take over from the Windows boot loader, it’s not doing that. So now I have a broken MBR and a broken GRUB as well, again. Now I find something called “Super Grub Disk” that is bootable and is supposed to repair all this mess. It doesn’t, at least not automatically… But now it’s clear that you can muck with all this, and fix it. I now appear to have GRUB on the MBR, and then again in my Linux partition, the first pointing to the other, and neither work. So I boot into Windows Recovery Console again, and restore the Windows MBR, again.

And around and around… Finally I pick up a clue from the error messages that GRUB is giving me trying to boot either OS, and I reboot into Linux via the Live CD and manage to figure out with the help of these instructions how to find and edit the menu.lst that controls what how GRUB does its thing. Basically GRUB was looking at the wrong disk (hd1,7 instead of hd0,7), and once I changed that around in the config file it was able to do its thing. Now I have GRUB as the primary boot loader – if I select Linux it boots Linux and if I select Windows it boots Windows (now of course with the added sub-menu of Windows’ own boot loader showing the option of Windows Recovery Console…)

Who knows how all this crap works, but at least I have them both running now.

On a final note, let me just say that these three pages, while apparently popular with the general public, are entirely useless in terms of figuring out anything meaningful about setting up an XP/Ubuntu dual-boot situation.

I switched to GMail during my trip to Europe, and overall I like it, but I just ran into a nasty bug. Not with GMail itself, but with the Textarea Backup Greasemonkey script: the script “backs up” and therefore fills in the hidden Cc: and Bcc: fields, resulting in emails addressed to one person going out to all sorts of other people. Not what one wants *at all*. So if you’re using Textarea Backup, be sure to add an exclusion for GMail. See http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7671 and search for gmail for further detail.

Another one of those “thanks anyway, Microsoft” moments. You know how if you have a couple of images on a page in Powerpoint, and you paste in another one, and Powerpoint oh-so-helpfully f**king RESIZES and REARRANGES all the other images on the page in a futile attempt to make them all fit? How incredibly idiotic. And how do you turn it off? Google Answers doesn’t know. It turns out that the “feature” is called “automatic layout”, and the checkbox to turn it off is buried in the in the AutoCorrect Options dialog. Makes sense, no? Of course, since, AutoCorrect is a feature that corrects your spelling, why not name this waste of code “AutoLayout”, and throw it into the bottom of the “AutoFormat as you type” subtab of the AutoCorrect Options dialog, under the heading “Apply as you work”. Right. Perfect. Well, now you know. Amazing, the stupidity. Amazing!

The actually _is_ a Microsoft product that I _do_ like though. I just replaced my 10+ year old Compaq clickety-clack keyboard with a new MS Comfort Curve 2000, and I like it alot. Not only was it the cheapest one, but it has just enough of a curve with being one of those full-on “ergonomic” keyboards. The keys have a good feel and are pretty quiet. It’s got a play/pause and mute controls that work with iTunes, and a calculator key over the numeric keypad. It doesn’t have a bunch of other whiz-bang “media” keys or anything, but those are all useless anyhow. Nor or it wireless, but what’s the use of getting rid of the wire leading to your keyboard if you have to worry about replacing the batteries? Whoo, go Microsoft keyboard division.

…but it’s darn useful. “iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city.” And it is. And it works! Instantly! Amazing! There are a couple of other tools out there that I’ve come across recently, like TourFilter and SonicLiving, but iConcertCal is integrates directly with iTunes and presents matching shows in simple calendar format… it rocks!

I got a new printer. Whoo. I got it because the last one I bought didn’t have a document feeder, and that would be a nice convenience to have now and then. The new one also does duplex printer, although rather slowly. So great, new printer. Well, it also came with a couple of features that, by way of the fact that Windows is such a POS, are instead bugs. The printer has a couple of (to me, entirely useless) memory-card reader slots. Windows, of course, sees these and tries to assign them drive letter(s)… well, something about this conflicts with how Windows iTunes mounts my iPod (also using a drive letter), so that if the printer is attached, the PC won’t recognize the iPod at all. I have to unplug the printer to get the PC to recognize the iPod, and if the iPod is connected and I reconnect the printer, the printer driver software starts complaining that I’ve connected an “incompatible device” to the printer. Eh, yeah. Not. Somehow I know this isn’t the fault of Canon, or Apple. It’s Windows. Feh.

I’ve been using diggdot.us for a while, but there’s a lot of junk in there, and it doesn’t include other stuff I like to read about (i.e. Mac voyeur sites), so I went looking for something else… and found it: Original Signal rocks!

I’m sure I’m not the first to say this, but it seems certain that the forthcoming launch of Microsoft’s latest non-release will drive folks looking for a *real* upgrade to Max OS X and the Apple platform. It just seems so pathetic! Another lame reskinning with no real features, and the same old bass-ackwards take on usability. If these are the “11 reasons to give Vista a chance“, MS should be embarrassed. In fact, it seems like they’re already scrambling to get out a follow-up release – although I don’t see how this could really be much more promising.

“Life hack” is a goofy term, but there are a few PC tricks that work well for me and do save a lot of time. Many of them are ways to minimize using the mouse.

Mozilla/Firefox Custom Keywords/Quick Searches

Use Alt-D to move the cursor to the browser’s URL address field, then type the quick search keyword and whatever you’re searching for, and hit enter. Firefox will fill in the %s in the quicksearch bookmark URL with your search text, and then open the URL, taking you directly to the search results page. Some examples:

• Google: g AdMonsters
• Google Local: gl hardware — note that I’ve added my zip code into the stored URL
• LinkedIn: ln bowen dwelle
• Amazon: z age of winters
• there are a ton more of these listed here

AutoHotKey shortcuts

AutoHotKey is an awesome free keyboard macro program that you can use to automate all sorts of things. My AutoHotKey file has all sorts of things in it – whenever I find myself typing the same thing frequently, I make an entry in the file to save time in the future. Some of the things I have in there:

• Shorthand for commonly used words, e.g. “oppty” expands to “opportunity”, “regi” expands to “registration”, etc.
• Signautures, email addresses, phone numbers, URL’s
• type “euro” and get the € symbol
• Credit card numbers – I have a macro that pastes in my CC number, and then pops up a dialog that shows expiration date and security code, so I don’t have to look it up when filling out forms…
• F11: switch to Outlook and move focus to contact search field
• Ctrl F11: switch to Outlook, move focus to contact search field, paste selected name, and run the search
• F12: open selected URL
• Ctrl F12: Google search using selected text
• Win C: open Calculator
• Win V: open Volume Control
• and lots more…

Devices

PC card slot StashCard – Handy for exta SIM & SD cards.

Anagram

Anagram is a great little program that does one (or two) things really well.

• Select some text (like an email signature) and hit Ctrl C twice in quick succession fires up Anagram, which parses the text and creates and Outlook Contact record.
• Anagram also adds a “Copy As Text” button to Outlook, handy for pasting contact info from Outlook into emails and the like.

What’s missing? iTunes: sync between two machines

It’s way too hard to use iTunes with two machines. I have a laptop and a desktop PC, as well as a 4Gb Nano. Why doesn’t iTunes make it easy to manage a single music library across all three?

Download and import new music

1. download mp3
2. find download directory
3. download album art into new album directory
4. rename to folder.jpg
5. import new mp3(s) into iTunes
6. select newly imported songs/album
7. drag album art into iTunes

Copy to second machine

1. (keep track of new music directories)
2. copy album directory to other machine
3. import into iTunes on other machine

And song ratings, etc still aren’t syncronized at all. Argh!!! Any suggestions for improving that? Why can’t iTunes treat my laptop just like my iPod?

Some comment spammer just started crawling my whole site, so I finally had to track down and install the SecureImage plugin for WordPress. It seems to have done the trick… Thanks Thom and Dave.