Ok, I’ll admit it. Alcoholic beverages have killed a fair number of my brain cells. As a result I’m continually forgetting things (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!). Any way, here are two completely unrelated things I’ve forgotten and have had to look up today. So I don’t forget them again, and so you, dear reader, don’t have to go looking too far for them, I’m putting them here:

How To: Redirect Errors From Standard Out to Nowhere (*nux)

Here’s how to get rid of those annoying error messages you really don’t care about when running a script (everybody’s got their own excuse for not wanting to see this type of thing, even though it can be handy now and again):

user@computer:~$ [command] [options] 2>&1

Stick “2>&1” at the end of your command string, that about covers it!!

How To: Launch Firefox With a Specific Chrome Interface (Windows)

Ever install a nifty little Mozilla Firefox extension and want to run it as a standalone program? Here’s how:

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox>firefox.exe -chrome [chrome path]

Add the “-chrome” option to the firefox command, then add the chrome path after that. Here’s an example of how to launch the bookmarks manager as a standalone program:

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox&gt;firefox.exe <strong>-chrome chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/bookmarksManager.xul</strong>

Enjoy!!

Firefox is great, but the built in page source view is just so-so. I decided that I wanted to use Programmer’s Notepad (awesome freeware utility by the way) to view and edit generated page source with Firefox. With IE you can change your default page source editor and viewer from the Internet Properties>Programs tab. That is, if it’s been entered into your registry so that it’s on the list of HTML editors.

With Firefox the process is s a little more simple in that you can make the changes from your about:config file:

“If you want to view the HTML source of a web page using an external text editor instead of the built-in source viewer in Firefox, use about:config to set view_source.editor.external to true, and then set view_source.editor.path to e.g. C:\Windows\Notepad.exe or whatever is your preferred text editor.”

If you use the excellent Firefox extension Web Developer then you’ve also got a way to add several other programs for specific purposes. For instance, if you wanted to use Top Style Lite for checking out CSS and the afore mentioned Programmer’s Notepad for PHP and ASP, but not HTML or JS files.

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OK, so maybe I’m a bit slow (many of you have probably already figured this one out), but I still think this is cool.

A few weeks ago I was typing search text (actually a part number followed by a manufacturer) into the search bar in Firefox and I noticed that as I typed the auto-suggest was subtracting the numbers on either side of the hyphen in the part number before I had input the manufacturer. After I’d finished with my search, I decided to look into this further. Sure enough, if you typed in formulas, added conversions or input special operators, the Firefox search bar and Google were returning the results – without actually submitting it!

Now call me crazy, but I think this is pretty sweet! I don’t have to waste all that time hitting enter or clicking the search button and waiting for the page to load (OK, so I’m lazy :). All I’ve got to do is punch in the formulas I want and I automagically get results back!

Of course, this got me to wondering what else is going on behind the scenes in my favorite browser. Then I thought better of it. That’s the kind of thing that could keep you up at night…

Link to Nancy Blachman’s Google Calculator (Cheat Sheet)