scrolling screen shot on ubuntu

I've been using ubuntu for the last 6 months, really like it! But also really missing SnagIt :(

so far I have come across these screen shot tools

• built in 'save screen' program - read this post for info about that and others
• Shutter

but none that I came across would do scrolling screen shots; currently I only needed scrolling screen shots of web pages and I just came across a great tool for that - a firefox add-on called Abduction, it is really easy to use.

For full page screen shots (including all scrollable regions) or for cropped sections of a page. Just right click on the page and select 'Save Page as Image', if you are over an 'element' it will auto select that as the cropped area, you can then adjust the crop and save, if you want the entire page the easiest seems to be right clicking where there are no elements below the mouse and then adjust the fully selected page as needed

The saved png can then be opened in Shutter for applying arrows, boxes, etc...

bash scirpt to launch rails development environment

here is a bash script I put together to launch my rails development environment, i got tired of opening multiple terminal windows and cd to the project dir, this script

• launches script/server in a terminal window
• launches a new terminal and cd to the trunk
• launches firefox at http://localhost:3000 with a specific firefox profile
• and launches Komodo Edit - go ahead and pick the editor of your choice
  

this works on Ubuntu, probably on other Linux distro's that use Gnome



I saved this in a file ~/scripts/launch_YOUR_PROJECT.sh
to execute this open a terminal and type ~$ bash ./scripts/launch_YOUR_PROJECT.sh
or create a symlink in your home directory



then execute using ~$ bash launch_YOUR_PROJECT

NOTE: in theory you should not need to even specify bash at the command prompt, when I did not I received the following error "bash: launch_YOUR_PROJECT: command not found"
running 'which bash' returns '/bin/bash' which is specified in the shell script?, something to look into later.

IE8 multiple cookies for the same site

Internet Explorer 8 is here - oh joy....

As a web application developer I spend a lot of time logging into sites as different users and prefer to be able to toggle back and forth between multiple instances of a browser maintaining the separate sessions in each instance. With IE 7 this was not an issue as long as IE was launched from the toolbar. In IE 8 sessions are shared by default, once again a Google search delivers the goods!

This post explains the -no-merge switch

as easy as Start -> Run -> iexplore.exe -nomerge

FireFox has a similar issue, but the only work around I know of with FireFox is to create separate profiles, see this post - FireFox and multiple cookies for the same site




Update: FireFox and multiple cookies for the same site

well after a few days with CookieSwap it seems a bit buggy, basically if you open two browser instances and then switch the CookieSwap profile it is updating both browser instances making it somewhat useless?

so I did some more googling and now using this technique

Initial Setup
- close all instances of firefox
- Start -> Run -> firefox.exe -ProfileManager
- create 5 or so profiles, I named them p1 - p5

Then when you want to use different profiles launch each one from the command line
- Start -> Run -> firefox.exe -P p1 -no-remote

each profile is totally distinct (history, cookies, etc...), only issue there does not seem to be an easy way to tell which profile you currently have open, I think I can live with that

FireFox and multiple cookies for the same site

I like FireFox but still use IE most of the time; one of the main reasons is during web application development I need to login to the same web application as different users at the same time, switching back and forth between each user account. IE makes it easy just open a new instance for each individual user account.

In the past I tried to find a solution for FireFox, but always came up short. Well today I did a google search and came up with two different ones!

both are FireFox extensions

• CookiePie
• CookieSwap

after a quik spin with both I am liking CookieSwap better

With CookiePie you right click on the individual tab to toggle seperate cookie sessions on or off; just didn't have good luck using it the way I would do stuff with IE

With CookieSwap you right click in the lower right hand status bar area of FireFox and can toggle between named profiles (default is Profile1, Profile2, Profile3) - this worked right out of the box as I would expect!