Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

The blog about mobile tech

Tag Archives: Firefox

Web Workflow

A long important requirement for me has been the ability to have the perfect web working environment on whatever machine I happen to be using – the netbook, the ultralight laptop and the clunky desktop replacement at home. I have long been using Mozilla Firefox with initially Google Bookmarks, but have since moved on to a combination of Xmarks and the Delicious extension for Firefox. Fairly recently however I have been moving away from Firefox for no other reason than to have a little spice… in fact I have been using Internet Explorer because of some corporate reasons, and Google Chrome because my main hosting provider for services has become Google, and for some reason Google likes to require Google Chrome for some of the nicer features.

A big problem for me has been getting all my extensions and saved passwords securely on all of these browser instances and I have had reasonable success with both Firefox and Internet Explorer, and in the last few days with Google Chrome. Safe to say, I believe I can now use whatever browser on all of my machines with complete access to all of my bookmarks and other browser stored data.

What is a problem however is making sure that all of my extensions for these browsers is on all of my machines. This has been a manual process but now comes this news: Google Chrome Working on Extension Syncing Feature | Webmonkey | Wired.com.

Now if this sees the light of day, this could start the push for me to change my default browser to Google Chrome. After all, Google Chrome seems way faster than anything else I have…

On the road failure

generic_road_crash Well it had to happen, I am on the road and my netbook suffered a hardware failure. This was a non-fatal failure but a failure all the same – the WiFi went on the fritz and would not connect to any WiFi network. Now in the office this was not a major problem as I have wired Ethernet there but the company I work with has a second office which only have WiFi which pretty much meant that I could not work there nor could I do anything when I was back in the hotel.

So the decision was taken to replace the machine with something that could work particularly since I was four nights/five days from base. So given machine obtained (an Asus EeePC 1008HA), the recovery mechanism started.

What can I say about the experience? It took way longer than I hoped… in fact to basic usage of the machine it took the whole evening (expected) and to fully complete four days. Why did it take so long? Well the big time killer was synchronisation of files using Live Mesh – it just took a long time because I have a lot of data to put on the machine. Even then, this was sped up by the use of the non-dead machine I was replacing being local to the laptop for much of the recovery time, so this is not an issue of upstream performance on the small business ADSL. The one main thing though about the recovery mechanism was that it did work and got me working on the road. How about your on the road recovery mechanism? You really do need one for when you are on the road.

Note: My recovery steps

1. Base install of OS and configuration for basic networking including Anti-Virus (including machine hardening steps that I always follow)

2. Install key applications – Live tools, Live Mesh, Evernote, VPN client, Firefox, Firefox addins such as delicious and Xmarks to ensure I have my bookmarks and saved passwords, RocketDock, Skype, Skype handset drivers, Spambayes, WinSCP, Adobe Air, Tweetdeck (using group sync so I have all my groups) and Syncback.

3. Install MS Office 2007 and Project 2007 using online downloads of Trial software (hey I do not carry the disks, no need to when you can get the Trial versions that work up to 60 days).

4. Configure Outlook 2007 for my multiple Exchange hosted mail and IMAP4 accounts.

5. Install key driver software for 3G card etc.

6. Setup Live tools such as Live Messenger and Live Sync as necessary (I use Live Sync for My Pictures rather than Live Mesh just because it is setup in a better way for those file types).

7. Sync core file folders that are in Live Mesh

8. Sync secondary file folders in Live Mesh

9. Install iTunes and move my iPhone over and setting up Podcasts that I listen to on it (Music waited until it had completed synchronisation as I use Live Mesh that my MP3s are on all my machines).

10. Install Truecrypt for whole disk encryption, although activating this is outside of the four days :-)

11. When back at base, reinstall MS Office 2007 and Project 2007 using my actual media and proper activation keys (needed because the trial versions do not activate with my keys probably because my keys come from a volume licensing deal).