Font Issue – Firefox 3 on Mac OS X

Just upgraded the wife’s Mac to Firefox 3, seemed to be painless and straightforward.  Until she went to use it the first time herself and some sites would show garbled text, what looked like squished fractions for certain text on web pages.  Only certain sites, only certain text.  Wikipedia is one that is usually affected.

Unfortunately not much information can be found on MozillaZine or most support forums.  Mainly because it’s kind of hard to describe or find the right search terms for.  But I did find a support post finally that pointed me to the true fix: disable the Helvetica Fractions font in Font Book.

Hope this helps save an hour of someone else’s time

Viewing large text files

Needed to look at a 8GB log file tonight.  Don’t ask why it was that big, it shouldn’t have been   Only a brave soul tries to open that with Notepad or any old text pad application.

Once again, Google is your friend, as I found Large Text File Viewer.  It opened that file and only took 2MB of RAM to do it.  Coop sweet!

Updating a Windows Service

Ever need to update a Windows Service? I had a problem today at work, my PC was incorrectly setup by the technical services team, one of my services’ “Path to Executable” was pointing at the wrong .exe. I had seen the sc.exe command-line command before for creating services, but I only wanted to modify an existing service.

Luckily I found a page online that mentioned these settings are in the registry. Browse to the following hive and see all the settings for your service that you can modify, and at least the “Path to Executable” seemed to take effect immediately with no reboot (Windows XP Pro SP2).

DISLAIMER: Do this at your own risk! As always touching the registry is risque business

\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
\SYSTEM
\CurrentControlSet
\Services
\___YOUR_SERVICE_NAME___