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As a web developer, one of the worst nightmares has to be dealing with all the different browsers under the sun (not to mention the various versions).

I wrote about installing different versions of Internet Explorer on Windows XP for testing purposes (simply because each version is so drastically bad in its own unique way that you need to test each one of them separately). I had decided to take that one step further with Firefox today.

Thank goodness for oldapps.com, I was able to get hold of Firefox 1.0 and 1.5 to play with in XP.

Installing on Windows XP (not for the faint of heat, or you can try the standalone versions of Firefox without worrying about going through the troubles.):

1. Download and install an older version of Firefox. When you run the installer, make sure you choose custom installation and install this version in a different directory. For example: Mozilla Firefox 1.0 (in keeping with the default naming convention). Continue installation as prompted. DO NOT RUN Firefox when it’s done.
2. Open Windows Command Prompt and type the following and press Enter:
set MOZ_NO_REMOTE = 1
3. In the same Command Prompt, type cd and find your way to the version of Firefox you just installed. Using the folder naming convention above, it’s probably something like this:
cd /"Program Files"/"Mozilla Firefox 1.0"/
4. Once you are in the directory, type the following and hit Enter:
firefox.exe -profilemanager
5. Firefox’s profile manager should now appear. Now create a new profile and name it accordingly (i.e. firefox1.0). If you want, name the default profile to the version of Firefox you currently have prior to the installation.
6. Now go to the appropriate Firefox folders and make shortcuts from them and put them where you access them the most (The Taskbar in my case).
7. Right click on the shortcuts and select Properties to pull up the Properties window. In it, there’s a Target field. At the end of it (after the double quote), append the bolded typeface in the following:
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 1.0\firefox.exe" -p Firefox1.0

Do this with each version of Firefox shortcuts you have with a matching profile name. And you are done. The only caveat is you can't run multiple versions of Firefox concurrently like you can with the "Multiple IE" install.

Here’s what my VMWare Windows XP Taskbar looks like:

Installing on Mac OSX:

The process is similar to those found on Windows XP. But I couldn’t get them to work as advertised. So I can’t really endorse the methods here. But there are standalone versions out there that made my life easier.

The upside of Mac OSX is, multiple versions of Firefox can be running at the same time!

UPDATE: I did manage to get multiple Firefox versions to work without asking for a profile upon launch every time as described by Jeroen Coumans’s blog (PDF). But there’s a trick that you should know about!

For the life of me I couldn’t get them to launch without asking for a profile even though I followed the steps exactly. The problem? I had three versions of Firefox in the same directory labeled:
Firefox 3
Firefox 2.0
Firefox 1.5

That’s a NO to the hack described on the site. In order for the script to recognize the paths, the portion of the name following the word “Firefox” can not be repeated. I have tried “Firefox-” followed by the version number, but that didn’t go. And underscore didn’t do it either. But if you simply remove the space making the names looking like:
Firefox3
Firefox2.0
Firefox1.5

Then all is good.

I will probably install a couple of older versions of Opera as well since they are supposedly pretty simple — simply install different versions of Opera in their own folders and be done with!

via [JiveBay] and [Jeroen Coumans]

Grace asked the other day what Alicia was talking about WWSJD… I paused in disbelief.

It’s no secret I am a Mac fanboy. More specifically, an Apple fanboy. Not that I think everything Apple does is the best, but everything they have done shows they have put a lot of thought and understanding in their products, services and their audience. I just can’t say the same thing about any other company.

So it’s only natural that I have come to admire how Apple has been able to design everything with an element of “human touch” to it. This was less evident during the “Steve-less” years of Apple. But suddenly when he returned, everything has a “Steve-ness” to it again! So I have concluded it’s the “Steve touch” that makes everything pop.

When I am stuck at a design decision, I try to clear my head and imagine “What Would Steve Jobs Do?” (WWSJD) if he was in the same situation…

Of course the act itself is a lost cause without having worked with His Steve-ness (though I came close having made to the final rounds of interview at Apple once in 2005). But the process works in that I’d be forced to think more objectively from a human interface design point f view. And I’d more closely study, dissect and analyze Apple’s UI design decisions on my Mac and on Apple’s website.

This also works in information organization, which is also an intricate part of UI design when the user has to interact and process the information visually. This has been something I haven’t been good at as evident with how the pricing section of my photography site is laid out. I am lost when there’s A LOT of information to be processed in a minimalistic fashion. So I am going to give it another shot sometime next week.

But word on WWSJD. Word

I quietly launched my photography site yesterday without making a fuss about it. I still think it’s not quite ready for “live”. But I am already three weeks past my self-imposed deadline (two days past the 2nd deadline). So it had to be up just as a matter of principle.

So I finally added a portfolio/gallery, added more blog entries (which I had to backdate for chronology’s sake) and made a bunch of enhancements to the backend management console. But I still have a bunch of stuff I need to do with it: Most noticeably — Trim and organize the portfolio in a meaningful order (Prof. Randy Akers would probably have something to say how the portfolio is ordered right now), further streamline the pricing section to make it easier to follow (possibly replace text with some kind of meaningful graphics or illustrations)… etc. I mean, that’s probably what Steve Jobs would have done!

Curious where my professional photography site is? www.shunchu.com

DUH!

I wanted to love Aperture. And I did. But it’s time to let go.

I was going through a few thousand images that I’d rated and enhanced in Aperture to look for stuff for my portfolio. I wanted to polish up a few images that I thought were good enough to make it into the professional portfolio. But it soon became evident that even 3GB of fresh RAM doesn’t satisfy Aperture’s hungry appetite for more! Spinning arrows, lagging waits and delayed responses were frequent. Somehow I don’t remember Aperture being so unpleasant to use — and this was Aperture 2.0, the version that supposedly offered performance enhancements.

Another bummer I discovered with Aperture 2.0 was that its new RAW engine v2.0 doesn’t support my Fujifilm S5 Pro at all. This means the RAW image rendering on my camera’s RAW files still looks very weird (blocky, blotchy and making images more like JPEGs) — basically when used with my camera’s RAW, it’s the old v1.1 engine with features enhanced around it.

So this drew the line for me. I am officially dumping Aperture. I will spend the next few months retrieving all the RAW masters and bring them in to Adobe Lightroom as their permanent home. Unfortunately this means I will lose ALL the edits and enhancements I made to all the images. But the upside is the images will probably look better with Adobe Camera RAW’s rendering engine. And I’ve gotten fairly efficient in using Lightroom that I can probably zip through those edits pretty quickly anyway.

The war is over. Adobe Lightroom has won. This proves that having a beautiful, extremely streamlined and intuitive user interface isn’t everything. Performance and proper support of RAW rendering, even with an inferior interface, can do wonders in a photographer’s workflow. I will just have to be more selective in what I deem “edit worthy” when I port the images over from Aperture.

Apple, I love you and all. But Lightroom will probably take over the professional photography workflow application market when Lightroom 2.0 is introduced. You can safely kill off Aperture now — it gave Adobe a good run for its money and made them haul ass on a software that was supposed to be dead. Gently unplug Aperture’s life support and put your resources elsewhere (i.e. save up to buy Adobe out right!).

I am almost two weeks late on getting my photography site up. And that upsets me.

I had almost everything ready to rock until I hit a sudden insecurity in myself — Will people really pay for what I want to charge for my photography? I had all the content thought through, written and even posted, all ready to beg a few friends to proof read them for me. And then I hit the “pricing” page. Then all wheels stopped turning as if someone turned off the steam engine (or snatched the hamster out of the exercise wheel) that was plowing ahead.

So I started to ask people around me to brainstorm on the feasibility of my business model, which is quite a departure from how photography is traditionally priced with other photographers. My core beliefs wants me to do one thing, but the standard practice in the industry wants me somewhere else. I was torn.

So I bummed around professional photography discussion websites for a week. And I spent a lot of time explaining to anyone who’d listen about my ideas and why I felt so confused… much of that time was waiting for people to get online, to reply my emails or just to meet up and talk… Ya know, just talk…

Finally I have arrived at a good place where I feel comfortable in putting up the pricing again. The up side is my original intuition about what I should do was right, but not without some modifications to minimize risks and to address some potential concerns. So I am ready again. And the site shall be fully functional by the first half of this week (fingers crossed).

I have to say that reading some of those professional photography sites also reassured me that I am heading towards the right direction. Some of what those photographers say made me realize that there is indeed a difference between art and ego. By being able to let go of my ego, I can breathe easier and feel better about myself, not to be caught up in a intellectual property fight with my customers. I will probably write another post about this later (or possibly even on my new photography blog). But the “slowing down” of that one week, now I understand, was needed for me to feel the conviction and feel better about myself as an artist.

So. I am back.

BIG thanks to: Grace (Mrs. Pragmatic), Jason and Alicia (the dynamic duo and sometimes my conscience), Brian (my Euro-American half brother), my cousin Alex (for casually dropping a bombshell which required me to address an important issue), and Miho (Ms. GREAT ideas mixed with an artistic twist).

And the following who actually provided advice a few months prior: Mari & Dave (great insights and business sense) and Christy (my #1 spy with insights of a “typical American mom” flavor).

Brian and I are supposed to start a project on a site that would help consumers make more informed decisions on products they consume on daily basis. It’s going to be a site where anyone with Internet (or heck, an Internet phone like the iPhone) would be able to find out immediately all they’d need to know about a certain product they are buying: materials used to manufacture them, labor conditions, political influences of the manufacturer, environmental impacts/footprints….etc.

So I was doing some reading and research on the underlying software and how I’d build or modify it to work the way Brian had envisioned. I went back to some bookmarks I saved for this project from a couple of months ago and was surprised that some of them had already gone offline! And then I dug deeper and did more reading and realized that a lot of useful info on how I’d approach the project had all but disappeared!

We have all been relying on the availability (or the perception of) and immediacy of the Internet too much nowadays. We expect everything at our finger tips through the power of Google. But most of the time we fail to retain the information the good old fashion way — make a copy of it… This is frustrating… So I guess from now I will just use OSX’s “Print to PDF” feature more liberally when I see a keeper on the web….

Fine. I am a technology whore.

Once I had a taste of Firefox 3 Beta 3, using Firefox 2 just wasn’t the same anymore — the speed, sleek look & feel… But there had to be a way around the random and frequent crashes!

So I surfed over to Firefox Mac Community Builds site and tried my luck there with one of the daily builds optimized for Mac OSX. And BINGO! Now I have a running Firefox 3 Beta 3-ish version that runs rock solid with none of the other issues I experienced with the official generic build from Mozilla. The stablized memory is also a welcomed change.

New problems though: There’s no cursor blink in text areas when typing in web based forms; some plugins still don’t work… etc. But I can live with these drawbacks given the advantages I gain in return.

So now I am a happy surfer again!

I’ve been using Firefox 3 Beta 2 for almost two weeks now. Other than a few minor glitches, it’s been a pretty stable release. I was generally pretty happy especially with its fixes on memory leaks, not to mention its sheer speed.

So when Firefox 3 Beta 3 came out today, I rushed to download the latest living-on-the-edge version. What a mistake that was… Beta 3 chokes and crashes on the tiniest things; page render screws up quite a bit; the bookmark menu is huge and un-resizable… I could go on.

On the other hand, the new UI is REALLY gorgeous and is very Leopard-ish. And again, the speed is amazing as does its memory management. I guess that means they’ll need a couple of more beta versions before 3.0 goes gold….

So now I am back with 2.0.x…

One day my phone was there, and the next day it was gone. Gone without a trace.

But who could’ve done it? Who could’ve done such a senseless act? WHO?!

“I could’ve called my cell and easily found it,” you say?

Oh, no…. If only life was always so simple and straight forward. No way. You see, I had the silent mode on so that I could be in peace and quiet when the least I needed was a ring to break my coding/writing streak. In the age of information and communication overload, being away from it all from time to time can be healthy…

To make a long story short, luckily I had the vibrate mode on. And the phone model is old enough to “vibrate” quite loudly… After a few landline calls to it, I finally pinpointed its proximity in the house — in a far corner of the living room where DVDs were kept. And it’s not just hidden randomly in the orderly pile either — it was carefully tucked away behind the DVD stacks where it was buried under the cover of another DVD. OH~~ Whoever did this was good; whoever planned this thought it through; whoever did this never intended for me to find it… It was a masterfully orchestrated theft…

The first suspect was, of course, Bryan (What! Like Grace was going to hide my phone for fun!?). I offered some candies in exchange for the location of the phone. But no~~, he was no fool and didn’t budge.
.
.
.

Who was behind all this? Bryan — now known as the Master of Treasure Burier, or I might as well call him the Asian toddler version of Arsène Lupin from now on.

We asked if he’d known where my phone was. He protested innocence and even offered to help (and did but only at places that I’ve already looked at right behind me and to no avail). And after I found the phone, he even became “genuinely” puzzled and queried how and why the phone got there (with a tiny sign of smirk in one corner of his mouth).

If even candies can’t buy him off now, I am worried if I’d ever be able to find anything in a couple of year’s time when there’s nothing that can make him talk…

As most web developers know, testing for Internet Explorer is a necessary evil that comes with the job. Fortunately a few tools has made the process easy:

1. VMWare to run Windows XP with (and Vista if necessary; but yuck!);
2. Multiple IE app;
3. Conditional commenting using alternate stylesheets if push comes to shove (coding to standards is easy for all other browsers but IE; this is when you don’t want to alter your “standardized” stylesheet just for IE fixes; kudos to Microsoft for making this possible);

But #3 failed me today, and I had to find out why the hard way — Internet Explorers installed via Multiple IE will always default to the latest version of the IE installed (credit). Meaning, if you have IE6 and IE7 installed, even IE6 will always declare itself as IE7 when it comes to conditional comments (but not in browser agent, thankfully). After applying the simple registry hack (oh, the good old Windows registry, you…) and a quick reboot, everything worked as expected.

Here’s the hack (in case the link provided above disappears for some reason):

… by removing the “IE” key in the registry subkey [HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector], Internet Explore defaulted to respecting conditional comments based on the version number prebuilt in the program.

You know that feeling when you’d like to get your hands on something for yourself, but it seems like everything else is just in the way?

That has been the case for the past 3 months with my little photography site. I mean, the site is setup and almost ready to go, but I have yet to go back to Aperture/Lightroom to locate and publish all the images that I’d like to show in the gallery section. And then I will also need to print some promote cards from Moo Cards to distribute and litter the city with. I am all nervous and jumpy about this.

So today I finally finished the last of all those programming gigs I’ve been buried with (they help pay the rent though; so I am not complaining). When I wake up, it’d be a brand new day, and I shall complete my site this week! Yoohoo!

One of my longest running clients just emailed me about another set of feature extensions they’d like to do for their site. So I better finish the photography site before they slap me again with another contract gig!

I’ve heard some “interesting debates” (to say the least) about the idea of Intelligent Design that somehow all people were “intelligently designed” by this supreme being living up in the heavens. And this supreme being is almighty and can do no wrong.

My answer to that is: that being could take some industrial design lessons down here on my humble Earth. And while he’s here, I’d like to ask him a few questions as to why he designed things the way they were if they were supposedly so intelligently designed (NOT!).

Anyone who’s tried to pick his/her own child’s ear can attest that the way ear wax are formed inside a child’s ear canals proves that the ears aren’t so intelligently designed. Some wax hug to the wall of the ear and seem to have root grown inside them. Sure, there are remedies to use and techniques to try, but my point is, if the ears were so intelligently designed, the damn wax would always fall out of the ear “by design”!

Evolution is dirty and messy, and that’s the way things work. Anyone who tells me there’s a God up there who so intelligently designed everything so perfectly can try to dip his head in the water for 10 minutes and tell me if the fact that we can’t breath under water was so intelligently designed by this God of his. When everywhere else in the world is in a hurry to fund math and [real] science, it’s hard to comprehend that here, in the United States, arguably the most advanced nation in the world, even has a movement that’s seemingly winning the “Intelligent Design” war in education. Are they really serious? Or is this just a big hoax by the Religious nuts?

Religion belongs to the heart and private homes; it has no place in education, politics or government.

Sorry. I was frustrated trying to pick some of the weirdest ear waxes in Bryan’s ears. And I thought this stupid Intelligent Design idea is just insane and poorly conceived…. hence the rant…