Recent Changes

2021-12-24

• 09:44 UTC (new) (history) 2021-12-24 Merry Christmas . . . . mbork – It seems that it is already a tradition that I wish Merry Christmas to all my readers! Of course, as old-timers surely know, I’ll offer a decade of Rosary for you.

2021-12-18

• 12:44 UTC (new) (history) 2021-12-18 Automatically starting Firefox with a clean profile . . . . mbork – I am currently working on a side project, which is a very specific web application. One of the requirements is that several users should be able to be logged in simultaneously and interact with each other in real time. For the “real time” part, I use websockets (with the Socket.IO library, which is quite nice to work with). Today, however, I wanted to say something about a different thing: testing. Not automated testing (I will probably blog about it later, too), but good old manual testing. The trouble is, how do I log in as two (or more) users at the same time? I can’t use separate browser tabs, since they share cookies and logging in or out in one of them logs me in or out in all of them. It turns out that if you open several “private browsing” windows in Firefox, they all share cookies and similar data, too – that wasn’t obvious for me, but this is how it works. I could use separate browsers (say, Firefox and Chromium), but that is far from comfortable – and obviously scales very poorly. Of course, Firefox profiles are exactly what is needed here. They have one drawback: it takes a lot of clicking to create a new profile. (Also, you have to name it, keep track of your profiles, delete the ones you don’t need anymore…) So, let’s script it.

2021-12-11

• 10:53 UTC (new) (history) 2021-12-11 My productivity system - design . . . . mbork – Note: this is another of those really long posts. It’s probably only interesting for some productivity geeks, since it describes my current system for beating procrastination and making most of my time (or rather, one layer of that system). In a future post I’m going to write about some (Org-mode-based) tools I use to actually implement it, but for now I just want to show the main ideas – in fact, this system was first implemented with pen and paper, and in fact it worked very well that way.

2021-12-04

• 07:59 UTC (new) (history) 2021-12-04 Org timer once again . . . . mbork – I’ve been writing about the Org timer about a month ago, and today I’m revisiting this topic because once I started using it, I discovered a cool feature which is, let’s say, half-documented.

2021-11-29

• 13:00 UTC (new) (history) 2021-11-29 Counting the number of columns in PostgreSQL . . . . mbork – So I had this pretty big PostgreSQL table, and I wanted to know how many columns it had. Should be simple enough, right? Remember about using psql to show how some comands are converted to SQL? Well it didn’t really help me that much.

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