HOW TO: Copy, backup and restore your Firefox bookmarks, settings and add-ons.

Written on December 7th, 2008

Firefox Logo

I formatted my workstation the other day and needed a way to transfer all of my Firefox bookmarks and settings. I stumbled upon a very simple and quick method through copying the Application Data folder. Interestingly enough, this method also has the welcome side-effect of transferring all of your add-ons as well; so things like DownThemAll and Firebug will all stay intact.

The folder you need to copy is: C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox (in my case C:\Documents and Settings\Nathan\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox).

The Application Data folder may be hidden on your system. To enable hidden system files do the following:

  1. From the explorer window, go to the “Tools” menu.
  2. Select “Folder Options…”
  3. Select the “View” tab.
  4. In the “Advanced Settings” area, enable “Show hidden files and folders”.
  5. Hit the Ok button.

The previously hidden Application Data folder should now be accessible.

Once you have this folder backed up, you can paste it into a Firefox Application Data folder on another system and have your entire user profile and customizations fully restored.

Note: This method has only been tested with Firefox 3 under Windows XP.

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Carrier has Arrived!

Written on October 8th, 2008

I would like to dedicate a post to my computer scientist friend, Josh Carrier. It was his Birthday yesterday; happy birthday Josh!

His brand new blog over at javadocs.wordpress.com is fantastic; it details his work on many interesting and geeky subjects, including but not limited to: Robots, Linux, Artificial Intelligence and of course, Java. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Josh complete a skynet equivalent in the future (..without the apocalyptic tendencies, of course).

Speaking of Java; Josh is quite obsessive about Java. As a computer language guy myself, I find this to be a good thing (what can I say, Java is awesome). Josh uses Java for many of his projects, one of which included solving a complex tetris cube using the awesome power of distributed computing.

The distributed computing project was born one evening after Josh and his roommate purchased one of the tetris cubes and attempted to solve it by hand. The tetris cube puzzle itself is quite complex; before you even crack open the package, it challenges you with a slogan like “9,839 solutions, we dare you to find one!”.

After many days of trying to solve the cube, Josh became inspired to build a distributed computing system to help. He went on to build a solving client, and a central server (which worked with the clients, collecting stats and managing workloads). Running these clients on any processing power he could spare, he also enlisted the help of a number of his willing colleagues, myself included.

Leveraging my new dual-core, I joined “the collective” (as Josh liked to call it). A number of days, and a few billion iterations later, the group of about a dozen computers, using Josh’s software, solved the tetris cube. Interestingly enough, it was my own AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (absolutely shameless plug for AMD) which ended up finding the first solution to the puzzle. It was certainly a fun project to be involved with.

Congratulations to Josh on his new blog; I find it excellent how our humble network of geek blogs is gaining more momentum every day.

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Dina Programming Font in TTF format

Written on October 7th, 2008

For a long time now, Dina has been my favorite programming font. I find it crisp, clean and very readable for the amount of pixel space it takes up (wide bowls, no unnecessary serifs). It’s certainly a nice change from Courier New. In my opinion, a great programming font is just as important as any other tool in the programmers toolbox.

Unfortunately, Dina does have one big pitfall. It’s only available in the bitmap based .fon format, which is notorious for bad portability. Incompatible on anything but Windows, and even some Windows applications will not read this format (Sun’s Java Netbeans IDE for example does not support it).

After a long day of various hacks and adjustments, I was able to convert the Dina font to a working TTF format. You can now benefit from the fruits of my labor using the link below:

Dina truetype font pack

Here is a preview for your viewing pleasure:

For those interested, this is a screenshot from the Netbeans IDE. I have been recently giving Netbeans and Eclipse a test drive in preparation for my upcoming developments in Java.

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A Suggestion from Michael’s Blog

Written on September 16th, 2008

I was reading some of the comments posted about the Berserker Reset over at Michal Marcinkowski’s blog. The following comment perked my interest enough to share it here:

#  Anon-O-Mus  Says:
April 5th, 2008 at 7:15 pm

You should make an entirely open-source game.

Where you make a basic shell, and the community has X weeks to do whatever the hell they want to it before it gets shutdown and released as a final game. Not only would it be fun, but the end product would probably be hilarious.

I know i’m not the only one out there who would like to see this attempted.

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Dryw Paulic, John Carmack, and Game Development

Written on September 11th, 2008

id Software logo

First I’d like to give a shout out to my colleague and longtime friend Dryw Paulic and his new blog over at Port-0.com. I think it’s great how our humble network of geek blogs is growing.

Over the past few days I’ve been slowly returning to my roots as an active game developer. This move was triggered by a Flash game project I was contracted to work on recently.

I’ve always found the world of game development as fascinating. The field attracts many different kinds of people, including a wide variety of creative and innovative types.

One of my favorite people in the game industry is John Carmack. For those who do not know him, he is the founder of id Software and inventor of one of the greatest game series known to man: Quake. He shares many of my own design philosophies, such as elegance in simplicity and ease of understanding. One perfect example of this is his Quake III networking model (a must-read for anyone designing or currently producing a realtime networked game).

Earlier this week I was watching a number of Carmack’s keynotes on Google Video. This man is passionate about what he does and has a lot of great ideas. For the most part, I find his presentations and writing very applicable and entertaining from a game developer point of view; I wholeheartedly recommend checking them out if you are seasoned or aspiring game developer.

Here’s a clip from his QuakeCon 2006 Keynote:

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

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Beautiful Open Source - Forum Software

Written on July 29th, 2008

Recently I’ve been finishing up the new LAN Party Eh website. Midway through development, I decided to search for a forum package to use in the project.

Truth be told, I have not developed with any forum software for over half a year, and as you know, in software time this can be an eternity. I decided that it would be best to take a few days and research my options.

Fortunately for you and I, there are many fantastic opensource forum packages available. The big advantage to this is there are a lot to choose from; if you do not like a certain package for some reason, you can just skip over it, and go on to the next. The downside to so many options is that it can take a while to choose and settle on the right package for your project.

Personally, I have a decent amount of past experience with forum software; from PHPBB version 2, to Phorum, to PunBB, to the Simple Machines Forum, so I generally know what I’m looking for. Each of these packages have their own set of advantages and disadvantages such as number of features, ease of customization and support availability. I wanted something fresh and modern, adhering to the latest in industry standards.

Fortunately, the package I am describing above does exist; after a few days of research, I settled on PHPBB3, the next generation PHPBB.

PHPBB has come a very long way since version 2. And in my opinion, completely outclasses its former self in every way imaginable. At first glance you will notice that it feels much more user-friendly than its previous incarnation. From installation to administration, all of the control panel menus have been cleaned up and simplified. Everything is much quicker to find and easier to use. Kudos to the user-interface guys on the PHPBB team for their great work!

For developers, the styling system has been completely revamped, this is great news as it makes the creation of custom styles substantially easier and less time consuming when compared to PHPBB version 2. While the custom styles themselves are still large compared to other forum packages, the whole system is quite complete and flexible.

Version 2 of PHPBB had a history of security issues, and although it was generally a nice software package, there was a time when it seemed like everyone using it had been hacked in some way. The PHPBB team have learned from the past and PHPBB version 3 seems to be much more secure.

Support for PHPBB3 is generally quite good. It’s one of the more popular opensource PHP boards available and has a significant following. The documentation is generally very effective and to-the-point. The community support forum is active and well populated.

My only complaint is a minor one of developer-friendliness. When creating a custom style for your forum, you are required to enable “Recompile stale style components” in the Server Configuration, Load Settings area of the Administration Panel in order to see any changes made to your CSS or template files. This is not immediately apparent at all. Luckily, I was able to find the solution on a support forum within a few minutes; although I can see many developers getting frustrated over this and possibly losing some hair.

Other than that, it has been a total pleasure working with PHPBB3 so far. PHPBB3 is a great example of beautiful open source forum software. I highly recommend it to anyone considering a forum package for their website.

As for the LAN Party Eh project, development has been going very smoothly and I am looking forward to launching it shortly!

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