Corrupt Firefox profile preventing access to the WordPress visual editor

Posted on By Mark Wilson

For the last few weeks (ever since one of the all-to-frequent Firefox crashes that I experience) I’ve been unable to use the WordPress visual editor to write my posts.  If I switched to another machine then everything was fine – the problem only existed in Firefox on one machine.  After seeking help on the WordPress support forums, someone tactfully suggested that I ask for help on the Mozilla forums… I wasn’t hopeful (as this problem seemed to be specific to WordPress); however the advice I was given was spot-on – it turns out that my issue was a corrupted Firefox profile.

After creating a new profile and copying key settings from my old profile (I copied bookmarks.html, certs8.db, cookies.txt, formhistory.dat, history.dat, hostperm.1, key3.db, mimeTypes.rdf and signons2.txt), I was able to relaunch Firefox and everything was back to the way it should be, complete with browser history, bookmarks, cookies, stored password, etc.  It should also be possible to copy items such as user preferences, search plugins and extensions but that’s not recommended if there were problems with the previous profile, so I reinstalled the couple of Firefox add-ons that I do use (the British English Dictionary and Web Developer extensions).

Mac vs. PC (vs. Linux)

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A few months back, I wrote a post about the Mac vs. PC ads (which, funny as they are, as a user of Macintosh, Windows and Linux PCs, I find to be a little misleading sometimes and downright untruthful others) before following it up when I heard an amusing Mac vs. PC parody on BBC Radio 4’s The Now Show. It was interesting to hear that Mac Format magazine judged the ads as ineffective because the largest group of consumers to whom they appeal are already Mac users (although Apple’s continuation of the Get a Mac campaign would suggest that it is working for them) and, in the comments on my recent post about some of the consumer-targeted features in Windows Vista being just as good as the functionality offered by Mac OS X, I was criticised for saying:

“Apple’s Get a Mac campaign draws on far too many half truths that will only become apparent to users after they have made the decision to switch, splashed out on the (admittedly rather nice) Apple hardware and then found out that the grass is not all green on the other side.”

Regardless of the effectiveness (or honesty) of the original ads, late last night, whilst researching for my rebuttal of those comments, I came across some more Mac vs. PC ads:

I’ve said before that the whole “my operating system is better than your operating system” nonsense is quite ridiculous really but the TrueNuff guys have it all just about summed up:

“Why would you love a Mac? Computers are computers. Macs are great. So are PCs. So are toasters – what’s your point? It’s just a computer – get over it.”

I’m enjoying the spoof ads though!