Firefox is still running. Erm, no it aint!

I've stumbled across this annoying problem with Firefox a few times over the years.  The one where you close Firefox, go to open it again and it pops up with an annoying dialog explaining "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system."   Restart my system?   Nope, don't think so!

It's the same every time. When I check Windows Task Manager, the Firefox process is nowhere to be seen - despite the dialog claiming it is still a running process.  After a bit of investigation (using Google Chrome!  Lol) I found out that a Firefox profile can sometimes be locked out and, therefore, when you try to reopen the application, it thinks that it's still running and will not open a new instance of Firefox.  Apparently, in Windows, there is a file called parent.lock contained within your Firefox profile folder (c:/Users/<yourname>/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/<some_profile_name>/) which, if deleted, will unlock Firefox.  However, when I checked, this file didn't exist anywhere so I decided to try a little experiment of my own and it seems to work.

Basically, all I did was:

• Changed one of the characters of the profile directory folder (e.g oc3wen25.default changed to oc3wen26.default)
• Opened the profiles configuration file in the root of the Firefox app data directory (c:/Users/<yourname>/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla/Firefox/) and changed the profile name in the Path entry of this file to reflect the other name change I made.
• Saved the file and tried opening Firefox again.  It worked!  A genius, so I am...

By doing this it saved me from having to restart my machine and now I know I'll never be screwed by this problem again.  I felt I had to share this as I know how annoying it can be.

Bye for now.

Louise and her Pins

I'm always on the lookout for new music and today I discovered an amazing voice.  It belongs to Louise Hull, and the harmonies are supplied by her backing singers - the Pins.  Louise and the Pins (great name) are a 50's style harmony group and their sound is truly chilled out.  I've always been fond of 50's and 60's music and that whole era if I'm honest and, this girl band - if that's what you would call them, bring that whole vibe to the fore very well.

Anyway, I'm no music critic, I just like good sounds to chill out to and this stuff fits the bill.  Enough from me though, go check them out for yourself:  Louise and the Pins on MySpace

Here's their version of Should I Stay or Should I Go by the Clash.

Wasting time, on the moon, for free

Geek alert!  I occasionally do geeky things, normally when I'm bored.  This was one of those moments.

So, I recently re-installed Windows 7 on my PC - don't ask why, which then involved going through the motions of installing all my favourite apps on it again.  An app that I simply can't live without is the Steam games client - it fills a void in my life and so it was one of the first to get chucked back on - how sad.  When I logged into Steam for the first time since the reinstall I noticed a video trailer on the store front for a game called Moonbase Alpha - a game published by NASA.  When I saw this I thought I'd better take a look - I mean it's not everyday you see a game endorsed by NASA is it?  Besides, I was bored and was waiting on something else installing.