Ever see something, some piece of cool, some bit of technology that makes your jaw drop? I had that happen twice this week. First have a look at David Kellogg’s website and his Plain Old Webserver (pow).

Plain Old Webserver (POW)

POW is either a really cool Firefox extension that turns Firefox into a web server or a lightweight xulRunner web server. Either way it serves up web pages using server side javascripting. Sweat! I still have to play with this a bit to get a feel for it because I’ve never used javascript on a server before, but considering this is portable to any system that xulRunner or Firefox will run on, it makes it a very versatile package right out of the box. While the fact that it doesn’t have a php module means I can’t do local development of my website on it (yet), POW does offer sqllite as a database. You can also download some extras for it like a Firefox database management or directory file listing.

You can also use the xulRunner “portably”. I quoted that because, while the POWUSB package includes both Windows and MAC xulrunner versions (no Linux yet either!), it isn’t exactly portable in the way that say, FirefoxPoratable is. In other words, if you run the included xulRunner on Windows, it will still leave files on your local file system. To make this truly portable, you’d need to refrain from leaving footprints on the system you’re using, therefore this really doesn’t qualify as a portableapp quite yet…

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I thought I knew a thing ‘er two about javascript (I taught myself javascript, and after HTML it was the first interpreted language I learned, and so far I’ve had no formal training in with ECMA specific code), then I saw Dean Edwards website. This guy (and his commenters) must live on planet ECMAscript for crying out loud (if you don’t believe me take a stroll through Mr. Edwards’ website and take a look at his projects and comments on his work, just freakin’ fantastic - from a programming point of view). Anyway, what I really geeked out about was his MiniWeb application. MiniWeb

What can I say, other than - freakin’ sweat! Contained in just 14 files is a (partial) javascript based blog, file management (will kind of, read on), and a *nix-like terminal (again, kind of). The reason for all those caveats is this; pretty much the fact that is is a work in progress AND, the fact that nearly the entirety of the system is contained in the one file: miniweb.html. Any new blog posts, files (which can be text or I think some form of executable - through some javascript magic), etc. are all stored in the miniweb.html file.

As I mentioned, it’s a work in progress, so nothing is complete, the terminal, the blog, pretty much everything but file viewing and management is incomplete. At this point I’m still just toying with it, so it pretty much takes on the Arthur C. Clark idiom of being so far beyond my understanding that it appears to be magic. To wield some of this magic Dean appears to use a home grown javascript compressor. Just… wow…

To check out MiniWeb click here. To download it and play with it on your own, click here. When you open up the file or depending on what you click on in what ever browser you’re using, you’ll probably have to get passed some of your browser’s security to fully use the software. In IE I think you need to allow the software to function on the bar that appears at the top of the browser window, in Firefox, depending on what you’re trying to do you may have to allow the script to complete some actions (don’t forget that “remember this decision” checkbox). Too much fun to pass up…

I wanted to check out the latest nightly build of Mozilla’s Firefox browser (currently version 3 alpha), but I didn’t want to uninstall my current version or overwrite, or screw up my profile and all those extensions I have installed. So how do you run two builds of Firefox at once? Pretty easily actually (while the following instructions are for Windows, similar actions can be used with Linux or Mac)!

First create a new profile

This is actually really simple, you just need to do one of two things:

Select Case

Case 1

From a command prompt or Start menu > Run type:

“[path_to_firefox]\firefox.exe” -CreateProfile [profile_name]

For most of us running Windows this will look like:

“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” -CreateProfile test

(”test” would be the profile name in this case)

Case 2

You can create a copy your Mozilla Firefox shortcut on your desktop, right click and select properties, then add the -CreateProfile [profile_name] in the “Target” field on the “Shortcut” tab of the properties dialog. Then click OK and double click the shortcut.

End Select

In either case, Firefox will create the new profile and not open any windows.

Now that you have a new profile you need to be able to open your new browser with the new profile (I’m assuming that you’ve downloaded a new browser and have extracted or installed it to your liking).

Create a new shortcut to you’re new browser

You can either copy your shortcut (if you’ve installed it) or create a new shortcut to the new version of firefox.exe, then (just like in Case 2 above) right click on the shortcut and in the “Target” text box, add -P test (or whatever you’ve used as your new profile’s name) to the end of the quoted firefox.exe path. The click OK.

Now, if you simply double click this icon you’ll open a new instance of your new browser build and you can start to play.

Just in case you want to use both your old browser and your new browser side-by-side

So, you say you’re curious if that website looks the same in your old browser as it does in your new browser, and you need them both open to tell? Well that’s no problem either. Open up the shortcut properties to your new browser just like you did above and after the “-P test” add in “-no-remote”. Now you can open multiple profiles, which should allow you to open your old browser and new browser side-by-side.

Have fun!

Reference Links from mozillaZine knowledge base:
Profile Manager
Command line arguments

So, who hasn’t been turning the web up-side-down looking for an alternative to Adobe’s Acrobat Reader for Mozilla’s Firefox? Hm? No one? Damn straight “no one”! Here’s one of the first open source versions I’ve found for Windows:

Fitz, MuPDF and Apparition

Now, before you get your hopes up too far, this a reader only. It will open PDF documents in Firefox, but that’s about it. You can’t use it to print, zoom in/out, select text or any of the other things you normally do with Adobe’s Acrobat. So if I were using this (hey wait, I am using this!) I’d disable Adobe Acrobat’s open PDF in browser option, (edit>preferences - general tab, I think, hell if you dislike Acrobat that much, just uninstall it…), install MuPDF, then restart Firefox. Next install (if you don’t already have it installed) PDF Download, and your choice of PDF viewing software (I recommend Sumatra or Foxit Reader). Now you can use MuPDF to open PDFs in Firefox or use PDF Download to download it to your hard drive, OR use PDF Download to open the document in your favorite alternate PDF viewer.