French characters on a qwerty keyboard

Since I am using Qwerty keyboards, it is not that easy to type the accented characters in french or even the euro symbol.

I can still use the Windows Character Map, or remember the ASCII code, but I can now also open up a website such http://www.copypastecharacter.com/, which simply does what it says he does (Copy/Paste characters)

Ecological font

For those who wants to help saving the Earth, http://www.ecofont.eu

Running multiple instances of Firefox

It is always useful to have several browser instances when developing and testing so that you can "impersonate" several different users at the same time.

IE does it for each different window; Firefox always shares the same instance even for different windows.

As per the title of this entry, you already know that Firefox allows you to do it but the "feature" is simply not available as a simple check box.

1. Start Firefox with the Profile Manager

If you installed Firefox in the default installation location, open a command prompt and run "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -ProfileManager

2. Create a new profile

You can choose any name but I used "testprofile"

3. You are ready now to run a second instance of Firefox with the testprofile

Again, if you installed Firefox in the default installation location, open a prompt and run "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P testprofile

If you need to run the other instance on a regular basis, you will simply create a shortcut with the command line above.

Need to run more than 2 instances at a time? You will need to repeat the process above and create more test profiles.

For more command line arguments, check the Firefox KB.

Windows Authentication with Firefox

With Firefox, follow the steps below to enable Windows authentication for your servers.

1. Open Firefox 2.x or 3.x

2. Navigate to the url "about:config"

3. Locate the following preference names and set their value with the list of servers separated with comma.

• network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris
• network.negotiate-auth.delegation-uris
• network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris

Your value should look something like this: localhost,myserverA,myserverB

Google's browser...

Google had just made the first BETA version of his (open-source) browser available.

First impression is good! The browser starts really fast with a simple UI as Google knows hwo to make them.

Browsing is also fast, using the same rendering engine as Safari (i.e WebKit)

Oops, I also forgot to give its name: Google Chrome

Read the comics explaining the history of the browser,

Download and install it,

And finally check that your web sites render properly with Safari and Chrome ;-) 

SQL Code Prettifier from Simple-Talk

Use the Simple-Talk Prettifer to format your code (SQL, C#, VB and Python)http://extras.sqlservercentral.com/prettifier/prettifier.aspx in your web pages.

Update (23-March-10): I have been recently using http://www.manoli.net/csharpformat/, which does a better job and allow xml formatting.

Discovering Writely

I just discovered the Writely project, which the Google online word processing project.

It is actually very good, providing with most of the features you are looking for in a word processing tool.

It is certainly not as good as a full-blown desktop software but provides some other features like online reviews with other users.

Other cools features are the capabilities to save to other standards formats (Word, Open Office but also PDF !)

And finally it's completely free...

Need some sample text for testing

I recently discovered a useful function in Office Word that allow you to generate some sample text. It is very useful when you need some text for your tests instead of typing manually "bla bla bla".

Open Word, create a new document and type =rand()
Word will automatically generates the following text:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

You can even pass 2 parameters to the rand() function. First parameter is the number of paragraph to generate and the second one is the number of sentences per paragraph.

By default, rand() is equal to rand(3,5)

Hope this will be helpful.

Free virtual CD tool

I finally got my boss to buy me a MSDN subscription :-)

MSDN comes with a lot of ISO file (CD image files), which are great but I did not want to burn a CD or DVD each time.

I looked for a virtual CD tool to mount this image files, but again did not want to pay for it...

I found that Microsoft has released a free virtual CD tool named "Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel v2.0.1.1". However it does not seem to be really marketed and is not available on MS.com
You can find it on Softpedia (http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Virtual-CD-DVD-Rom/Virtual-CDROM-Control-Panel.shtml)

The tool is rough but does the job!

Installation instructions

1. Copy VCdRom.sys to your %systemroot%system32\drivers folder.
2. Execute VCdControlTool.exe
3. Click "Driver control"
4. If the "Install Driver" button is available, click it. Navigate to the %systemroot%system32\drivers folder, select VCdRom.sys, and click Open.
5. Click "Start"
6. Click OK
7. Click "Add Drive" to add a drive to the drive list (Ensure that the drive added is not a local drive. If it is, continue to click "Add Drive" until an unused drive letter is available)
8. Select an unused drive letter from the drive list and click "Mount".
9. Navigate to the ISO image file, select it, and click "OK" (UNC names don't work).

You may now use the drive letter as if it were a local CDROM device.

When you are finished you may unmount, stop, and remove the driver from memory using the driver control.

IE7 Beta2 Preview available

Microsoft has just released the Beta 2 of IE7.

It can be downloaded from the Microsoft site.

The new UI is simply great and simpler with the useful tab browsing, ripping off all the unuseful menus and toolbars to widen the screen space. A must with the endless growing content of websites. Another great feature to ease content reading is printing improvement, which is supposed to allow you to print pages without them being cut.

I have not tested the supposed now-supported CSS2 standards, but the rendering is good.

The font are rendered slightly differently than with the current browsers. While it is pleasant to read text the font looks like "bolder" (I hope that we won't have all to adjut our style sheets when it is released...)