Customising Firefox

Sometimes, I realise that my most-used Firefox (my portable one, get your own copy from here) is better than everybody else's, and I rack my brains to remember just why. I try to remember just what addons I use when I'm using someone else's Firefox (or even one of my less portable versions) and usually fail. Do I let that bother me? Hell, yes.

There's a new Firefox addon that lets you make collections of addons. (That comes from here.) I've used it to put all my addons in one place -- primarily for my own benefit, I grant, but I've left the collection publicly available because if it's good for me, it must be good for everyone, right?

You can see the collection here.

However... my portable Firefox lives on a portable hard disk, not a thumbdrive. Firefox would probably take about a month to start, loaded from a memory stick and with this many addons. Call it bloated if you like; you can take your opinion and... er, anyway, I'd only suggest you use this lot from a nice, speedy hard disk -- unless you're particularly patient, anyway.

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Catch 22 strikes servers

Here's another thing. The computer system I manage has been running, rather badly, under VMWare for the last couple of years. As a result of an entirely different problem (well, sometimes it's just necessary to get people to focus for a while on one problem to bring up all the others as well) I'm now in a position to move it back to a real, honest-to-goodness, physical server.

Well, almost in a position. Obviously, there's some testing to to, and some bits to install and tweak before golive. And what we find is: since setting the previous incarnation up, Active Directory has reared its ugly head. (The Ivory Tower has to find things to justify its existence: last year's thing was AD.)

In order to follow AD policy, I have to login to the server using a non-administrative login and do everything, once I'm logged on, using "Run As..." to do things that need administrative privileges. Painful but achievable, I guess.

Thing is, policy also says that I can't login via Terminal Services (aka Remote Desktop) if I'm not an administrator. And there's no other way to login.

Sometimes, people who think they know what they're doing just don't think things through...

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Thumbdrives

Okay, thumbdrives are ubiquitous. Roomy, convenient, and with the growth in portable applications can be a really useful way to carry a familiar working environment around with you.

But they're not quick, are they? Even the fast ones aren't as quick as you want them to be.

Introducing my new toy: a 2.5 inch drive enclosure and a 40Gb hard disk from a dead laptop. Total cost: about six quid. Five times as much storage as my thumbdrive and far, far faster. So I copy everything off the thumbdrive and treat the new gadget just like my old thumbdrive.

One small concern: will I hit more problems with the NTFS format than I did with FAT32? Maybe I should have made two partitions. Maybe I'll do that before I go too much further... also, it needs two usb ports to give it enough power, but I think I can cope with that in most situations.

First impressions, though: marvellous. We'll see if I still feel the same way when it comes to carrying it in a pocket.

[Later] okay, I'm a coward. But I've repartitioned the drive (using the always excellent Paragon Partition Manager to do all the work) into a 27Gb chunk, converted to FAT32, and used the 10Gb remaining as an encrypted partition, created with TrueCrypt to replace the half gig Truecrypt volume I previously kept all the things I wouldn't want falling into the wrong hands. I'll probably never get close to filling it, but it's a sensible use for the space and, that way, I don't lose another drive letter.

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