Some Might Say

Firefox is still running. Erm, no it aint!

2011-11-19T10:49:00.001Z

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

2011-09-22T21:11:00.002+01:00

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

2011-09-21T22:47:00.000+01:00

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.

After sitting through three minutes of video showing a few animated US astronauts witness an asteroid hit and then bounce about on a virtual representation of the moon doing, erm, asronauty things, I decided to download it and see what all the fuss was about. The fact the game is free (yes, that's right, something for nothing) had no bearing on my decision. In fact, no, that's a lie, it did.

The download was quick, unusually quick actually. To put this into context, I pay a telecommunictions company (the one with the big red V) for what they claim to be 20 Mb download speeds but, to be honest, they royally shaft me most days and give me speeds that resemble nothing more than a good day on a 56k dial up connection. Anyway, I digress. After downloading and installing the "game" - I'm not happy about calling it a game as, for reasons I'll explain in a moment, it resembles more of dummed down simulation - I fired it up and was pleasantly surprised to see that it worked. The reason I say I was surprised about this is that my experience of PC games in recent times has been mostly about installing them and then spending the next two hours configuring their settings (graphics, controls etc) or patching them up, just to get the damn things actually running properly on my hardware - I love that word, it makes PC building sound all macho.

OK, so what's it all about then? Well, without boring you to tears, it involves bouncing around as a virtual astronaut on a small piece of the moon trying to fix all the hardware (there's that word again) that was broken during the asteroid hit. The reason for this is that the oxygen supply to the living quarters on the base has been cut and you have a limited amount of time to get it all up and running again before the virtual people that are inside it - the same one's that, annoyingly, keep asking you how it's coming along through a headset in your helmet - erm, die. I must admit, after about the tenth time of them bugging me about the fact they were running out of oxygen and that I should hurry up, I began to wonder why they couldn't just come outside and help me? In fact, it did cross my mind to just jump in the virtual moon rover and go for a spin, leaving them to suffocate, but no, being the kind of guy I am I continued bouncing around from one repair to another just getting shit done. They survived, but never even had the decency to let me in for a cuppa once they had all the oxygen on the moon back in their living room.

Health and Safey at work. Never leave cables lying around.

To be fair to the "game", the graphics aren't too bad and the animation acceptable, which kind of adds a bit of atmosphere to what is essentially a bland idea in an isolated setting. I've witnessed worse graphics in games I've paid for, so I suppose you'd have to be happy with anything half decent in a free title. It has multiplayer apparently, which would speed up the fixing of stuff I presume and would be good for a laugh as you all bounce about a bit - I'll never know, however, as I'll probably never load it up again. Moonbase Alpha is one of those titles that once its completed and you've pissed about on the moon rover for a while, trying to reach those places in the environment that you just can't and are not allowed to, you'll get bored and switch it off. The moon really is a lonely place.

I'm bored.

So that's it. Moonbase Alpha - good for mucking about on the moon (well an incy wincy part of it at least) for half an hour when you are bored, but that's about it.