Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

To my huge surprise, I just came across a partial backup of my old blog. Most of the content is there, however the WordPress part of it is broken, and there are some misbehaviours in categories, tags, and comments.

Since many of the posts in that blog are linked from all over the web, I decided to put them back online. However, I locked the old blog and it will not accept any new comments, links, or registrations. They will be no new posts. And there is a large red box on top of every page, sending people to this blog.

Old blog locked

I don’t think it makes any sense to fix anything else about that blog, nor do I think that merging the old one and the new one is a good idea – it will just create more work and will not sort out any mess.

Instead, I will gradually move content into this new blog. I will only move the important articles, and I will edit them to fit the site, as well as update any outdated materials.

… at least not everything is lost forever. These are good news and I am happy again.

The more and more I use Firefox, the more add-ons I install, and the heavier it becomes.  Recently I got to the point where I am annoyed by all the heavy weight functionality, but cannot remove it complete because I need it occasionally.

The solution to my problem turned out to be pretty simple, even if it required some Google searching and IRC chatting – multiple profiles.

By default, when you run Firefox for the first time, it created a default profile to store all your stuff – saved passwords, bookmarks, add-ons, etc.  However it is possible to create more profiles and separate things a bit.  For example, I currently have three profiles:

• Browser.  I use this one for generic browsing stuff, such news reading, email, etc.  Firefox add-ons for Gmail, Google Calendar, YouTube, Flickr, and other major sites I used frequently are installed under this profile.
• WebDev.  I use this one for my web development needs.  Web Developer, Firebug, Live HTTP Headers, and any other add-ons that help me do my job are installed under this profile.
• Default.  I keep this one clean and empty.  Sometimes I want to see how  site behaves in the browser with default settings – for this I use the Default profile.

Creating this profiles in very easy.  As per Firefox documentation, all you need to do is close all current Firefox windows, and then run Firefox from command line with -ProfileManager parameter.  A small window will popup that will give you options to create, rename, and delete profiles, as well as select with which profile to start the new session.

The problem that I came across was running several Firefox sessions in parallel, each with its own profile selected.  I could easily select the profile for the first session, but when I was starting up the second session, it would just reuse the same profile from the first session.

The solution to this problem is either setting MOZ_NO_REMOTE environment variable to 1, or specifying -no-remote parameter on the command line.  The -no-remote parameter on the command line seems to be a recent addition to Firefox, so if it doesn’t work yet for your version of the browser, you’ll need to fall back on to the MOZ_NO_REMOTE environment variable.

So, if you have a recent Firefox version, you need to run (updating your desktop and menu shortcuts seems like a good idea):

[user@host dir]$ MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 firefox -ProfileManager

If you want to start Firefox with specific profile (e.g.: DesiredProfile), you can do so with

[user@host dir]$ MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 firefox -P DesiredProfile

Alternatively, you can export the variable globally, by adding the following line to your .bashrc file

export MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1

If you have a recent version of Firefox, then the command changes to:

[user@host dir]$ firefox -no-remote -P DesiredProfile

Other things that you might want to keep in mind are:

• Some add-ons will be common between your different profiles.  For example, I want to have my delicious bookmarks available to me everywhere.  For these cases, you’ll need to install the same Firefox add-on to every profile that you will need it at.
• Some bits of configuration (such as custom keyboard shortcuts, for example), will need to be configured in each profile separately.
• You might want to have a different Firefox theme for each of your profiles, so that it’s easier to see where you are visually.

I love it when people who can do something really well start to fool around.  Here is a good example, a discovery of the week, so to speak -- comedy gymnastics by Paul Hunt.

There is more on YouTube if you search for Paul Hunt.  Here is another example.

I watched “Eagle Eye” recently.  I haven’t seen the trailer and the rough plot descriptions that I have seen around were way too vague, so I didn’t really know what to expect of it.  Once I saw it, I realized that the plot is indeed difficult to describe without spoiling it for those who haven’t seen it.  On the other hand, the covers are open pretty early in the film, so I wouldn’t felt robbed if someone told the truth.

If you don’t want to get any spoilers, stop reading here.  Maybe fast-forward to the last paragraph or so.  For the rest of you – the film is a bit too far fetched conspiracy of the computer going crazy.  It has all the attributes of any other conspiracy film – innocent victims, dictator’s plot for the greater good, lots of secrecy, lots of car chases and shooting, and a few federal agents.  The only difference here is that it’s not a human or an organization, but a supercomputer going nuts.

I think we’ve all seen films with computers going crazy.  These films had their time and place, except maybe for last one, which can still make it through.  I’m talking about the Terminator, of course.  Everything else should die off as an IT legacy.  Three year old kids these days know how to use a computer.  You can find one in absolutely every non-government office which has electricity.  Millions of people are connected to the Internet, have very sophisticated mobile phones, and have seen films about insane computers.  It’s just not working any more.

And I think that’s about the only thing that was bad in this film – the story.  Other than that, it was pretty good.  There are quite a few well-known people.  There are plenty of special effects.  There is enough suspense and drama.  And even something to listen to while everything moves, shoots, thinks, and explodes.

My overall rating is 4 stars.

Being a gamer myself and actually knowing something about the game world from the inside, I always found it funny when mass media talks about games from the evil point of view, especially when they throw the addiction bit in.  My position on this is that games are not drugs, games are not alcohol, games are not some other sort of chemical substance, so it is impossible to have physical addiction to games.  Yes, one can get used to games a lot psychologically, but the extent of this addiction is not even comparable to anything “real”, like smoking for example.

My opinion is based of course on my personal experiences and interactions with many other gamers.  They all are different people with varying level of “addiction” to games, but they are all sane people.

However, today I was enlightened.  And that reminded me of something else.  I used to listen to BFBS radio (British Forces Broadcasting System) a lot.  And I remember there was a period when they were discussing a problem they have in UK with pubs and early closing hours.  A lot of semi-drunk people are kicked out to the streets all at once and they don’t have anywhere else to go, but home.  I never thought of it as a big problem.  After all, how many pubs in the area can you have and how many people that could be.  I, of course, was thinking in terms of pubs we have in Cyprus, where the worst case scenario would be somewhere around 200 people.  Until I’ve heard the radio mentioning some pubs which host as many as 4,000 people.  Than I understood the problem properly.  Indeed, if you have a couple of pubs like that in the area and you kick all those people out at midnight, you’ll have a problem on the street with noise, crowds, and probably a few broken properties and a few wet walls.

In the same way I was today enlightened about the “game addiction” problem within younger generations.  How did that enlightenment come to me?  By means of this video (via The Next Web blog):

This opens a totally different perspective now, doesn’t it?