Author: Dave Farquhar

Message says Firefox is already running when it isn’t

Dave Farquhar Software , ,

Earlier this week, when doing an emergency computer upgrade, Firefox gave me a weird problem. I installed Firefox, then when I tried to launch it, I got the popup dialog box stating that Firefox is already running. When, of course, it wasn’t–I’d just installed it.

There are a couple of helpful articles on Mozilla’s knowledge base.  It didn’t quite solve my problem, but it pointed me in the right direction.
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And now I think it’s time for a new doctor

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

I’m sick. I’ve been sick for about three weeks. Not major major–I’ve only missed a day of work–but it’s irritating. And it’s been three weeks. A cold lasts about 10 days.

So I asked my wife to see if I could get in with her doctor. I don’t like my doctor very much. But my wife’s doctor isn’t accepting new patients until February. No political comments, please–I couldn’t find another doctor accepting patients in a reasonable time when Clinton or Bush were president either.

Last night, my throat started bothering me worse. My wife pulled off a miracle and got me an appointment with my doctor the same day, at 4:15.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this before. New Firefox.

Dave Farquhar Software ,

Firefox 9 is out. I’m running it, but due to an emergency involving a power supply deciding to cook itself, I’m running it on a different system than the one I ran Firefox 8 on. Everything’s faster on this machine–partly because I’m doing some experiments that make it stupid fast anyway–so it’s not fair to call Firefox 9 faster. Netscape 4.0 would be fast on this machine.

Once I’m comfortable that what I’m doing is safe, I’ll share.

But Firefox 9 features a new Javascript engine that’s supposed to be a lot faster, for what it’s worth. You can go get it the usual ways if you want. And if you’re conservative, given a little time you’ll be running it whether you know it or want it anyway.

And in somewhat surprising news, Mozilla and Google renewed their search agreement. Mozilla makes Google the default search engine in Firefox, and Google pays them a lot of money. So much money that Google is essentially funding the operation. Mozilla has a strange relationship with its competitors.

There goes the neighborhood

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

“Dave, you need to look at this.”

Those aren’t my favorite words to hear first thing Monday morning. I went outside to see, and there, I found a lot of debris scattered on the ground. At first, it looked like some animal had torn open a garbage bag. But then I got closer and saw it wasn’t garbage and trash. I saw coupons, credit cards, some change, and other personal effects.

Around that time, one of our next-door neighbors came out to let her dogs do their morning ritual. She and my wife waited while I went inside to call the police.
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I think this is the secret of Amazon’s success

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , , , , ,

When talking about e-books Friday, I mentioned that Amazon is making deals with authors directly, cutting traditional publishers out of the loop. And then my wife asked a good question: How does Amazon think of stuff like that?

I think it’s because Amazon isn’t hung up about last year. Let me explain.
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A simple way to make sure a Christmas-gift train works on Christmas morning

Dave Farquhar model railroading, Toy trains , ,
A simple way to make sure a Christmas-gift train works on Christmas morning

Last Christmas Eve, I helped one of my Internet pals figure out why a brand-new N scale train he purchased as a gift didn’t work.

He got lucky. He had his old train available, which he was able to steal parts from to get it to work that morning. Not everyone is that lucky. As long as you’re reading this before Christmas, I have some advice for you if there’s an electric train of any sort on someone’s list.

Set it up one night this week and make sure it works.

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The worst test I ever took

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , , , ,

I’m gearing up (finally) to take the CISSP, a 250-question marathon of an exam that covers everything from firewalls and intrusion detection systems to how tall the fence or wall around a building should be and what kind of lights to use in a parking garage.  And everything in between. Three of my colleagues have had CISSP certifications for several years, and on Friday two of them were telling me what to expect.

And the worst test I’ve ever taken came to mind. No, it wasn’t Security+. I had a pretty good idea I was going to pass that one, which I did. The worst test I ever took was Dr. Walter Johnson‘s Fundamental Macroeconomics (Economics 1) makeup final at Mizzou, circa Winter 1994.

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News flash: e-books are overpriced

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , , , ,

I saw a story yesterday about how e-readers are getting cheaper, but e-books are rising in cost.

In some cases, the e-books cost as much as, or more than a paper copy of the book. Which, as anyone with any knowledge of printing should be able to tell you, is ridiculous. Most of the cost of a paper copy of the book is printing and distribution. Or, at least that’s what they used to tell writers. When people paid $24.95 for a copy of my book, published in 2000, I saw about $1.75 of it. I’m probably not supposed to tell you that, but I just did. The printing and distribution costs of an e-book are negligible, so if the author, who does most of the work, is supposed to be able to get by on $1.75, shouldn’t the publisher and retailer find a way to do the same? So divide the revenue evenly between the author, publisher, and retailer, sell the e-book for $5.25 and, and everything’s fair. They could even put the book on sale for $2.97 sometimes, drop everyone’s share to 99 cents, and hope to make it up in increased sales.

But here are some things you can do while you wait for publishers to get a dose of reality.
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Fixing my boss’ Outlook

Dave Farquhar Office, Software , ,

My boss’ PC went wacky on Tuesday afternoon and wouldn’t let him log in, so he had no choice but to shut down the computer. The computer came back up OK, but Outlook didn’t. He got a lot of weird error messages that I didn’t see, and Outlook created a new OST file on his desktop. But Outlook refused to connect to the Exchange server, and his inbox came up empty.

Like a lot of Outlook problems, the solution was the tag-team of Scanpst and Scanost. Fortunately, you don’t have to have admin rights to run them.

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Adblock Plus adds an option for allowable ads

Dave Farquhar Software ,

Adblock Plus, starting with version 2.0, is going to start allowing acceptable ads, something I see as a good thing.

I’m not against advertising–I use it on my own site. I’d prefer not to have an all-or-nothing approach to ad blocking. In fact, I only started blocking ads when I started getting malware that I expected was coming from booby-trapped ads. I stopped getting the malware when I started blocking all ads, so draw your own conclusions.
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