Does your Firefox load slow? Try this.

Like me, you might really like Firefox. Generally speaking, it does a really good job. However, after turning on your computer (I’m talking Windows only), the first time you run Firefox it seems to take a long time to load up. Subsequent loads are okay, but that first one is the slow one. I recently came across a pretty nifty utility called Process Lasso by Bitsum Technologies. I can’t remember why I downloaded it . . . probably because someone recommended it as a way to speed up Windows Vista a bit. I’ve noticed  a significant improvement in load times for Firefox since I installed it a couple of days ago. That was a nice side effect. So, if your Firefox loads slow, try this utility (free for home use). It may speed up more than just Firefox. It works on pretty much all flavors of Windows, including XP x64 and Vista x64. Enjoy!

E Text Editor

If you haven’t checked out the E text editor for Windows, you might want to. This is one powerful editor. I’ve been using the trial version for a little while and have just scratched the surface of some of the cool features. Just this morning, I watched the screencast on the home page and found out there was a very cool feature that will no doubt save me some time. I can use the CTRL key to select multiple words, and change them all at the same time. Imagine changing a variable name in just a small section of code. Just highlight each one using the CTRL key and start typing. I love it! It also supports snippets, which are nothing new, but are very cool anyway. E taglines itself as “The power of TextMate on Windows.” I’ve never used TextMate, so this is a new introduction for me, and I like it. It’s hard to impress me with a text editor because I am a huge vi fan. I used it for a long time on Unix, and in my current job, I use it all the time on various Linux servers. I carried that use over to Windows with gvim. It’s powerful, to be sure. So, for me to even discuss another text editor is a big deal. The trial version of E is time limited to 30 days and the purchase price is $34.95. When my trial is up, I’ll be purchasing this one for sure.

Poderosa – A Viable PuTTY Replacement

I’m a long-time PuTTY user, but one of the annoyances is that it does not save passwords. I understand the reasoning behind why, but the creators of PuTTY took the stance of never going to add that as a feature. I found a decent replacement that does have password saving capabilities, and that is Poderosa. Poderosa is an open-source, free SSH tool with tabs, split window panes, and yes, password saving capabilities. It’s written in C# and built on the .NET 2.0 platform. A lot of people don’t like that fact, but .NET is so standard on Windows nowadays that it’s really no big deal.

I searched for quite awhile for how to have the passwords saved. Nothing I tried worked, so having the source code was useful. I ran the system through my Visual Studio debugger and found out exactly how the passwords are read in from the XML-based shortcut file. There is a configuration setting inside Poderosa that is turned off by default. Click on the “Tools” menu, then “Detailed preferences editor…”. Find the setting named “org.poderosa.protocols.ReadSerializedPasswords” and change it to “true”. Then, in the shortcut file (these have the extension “.gts”) in the second element, next to the “account” attribute, create a new attribute named “passphrase” and add your password there. Here’s what it might look like.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="Windows-1252"?>
<poderosa-shortcut version="4.0">
  <Poderosa.Terminal.TerminalSettings encoding="iso-8859-1" caption="Remove Server Name Goes Here" />
  <Poderosa.Protocols.SSHLoginParameter destination="127.0.0.1" account="joe" passphrase="myTotallyUnsecurePassword" />
</poderosa-shortcut>

Obviously, you would have the destination equal the IP address of the remote server.

Now, before you go all nuts about clear text passwords, let me just say that I agree with you 100% that passwords in clear text are a bad, bad, bad idea. Since I have the source code, I will be working on a way to have passwords saved in a different, more secured fashion, but for the moment, this meets my needs. Perhaps it will meet your needs, too.