A regular "feature" we will have here at the Ardent Dev Blog is a series of "Tool I Love / Tool I Hate" posts (kind of like the "What's On Your Hard Drive" column in Queue magazine).  A new addition to my tool set is the Venkam JavaScript Debugger for Mozilla.  The latest version as of this post was 0.9.85, which would not install for FireFox 1.5.  The XPI (add-on package) was hard-coded to a max version of 1.1.  Fortunately add-on packages for Mozilla are just Zip files that you can extract and hack pretty easily.  Here is how I got Venkman to install with FireFox 1.5:

1. Downlowd Venkman 0.9.85.
2. Change file extension to .zip and unzip.
3. Open install.rdf with your favourite text editor.
4. Find <em:maxVersion>1.1</em:maxVersion> and change the maxVersion to 1.5 (or any arbitrary number higher than 1.5 - it might or might not work on future releases of FireFox).
5. Save your changes and close your text editor.
6. Rezip the files and change the file extension from .zip to .xpi.
7. Open the new XPI file in FireFox (using File | Open File menu or just drag-and-drop).

If you are a brave and trusting sort of individual, you can just download my modified XPI here: Modified venkman-0.9.85.xpi (209.03 KB).

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Welcome to The Ardent Dev Blog (http://www.ardentdev.com/blog).  I (Derek) am very lucky to be able to work with a top-notch group of development / IT professionals here at Ardent.  I figure it is time to share them a little bit with the rest of the world.  From this blog you will hear about the tools and technologies we work with (.NET, C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, NUnit, NAnt, etc.), our thoughts on software development process / methodology, and perhaps a little about what it is like to work for a small software company.

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