Mozilla added a function to search on the web in the latest versions of Thunderbird.That's nice, but the default search engine is bing. As a DuckDuckGo user, I wanted to add my favourite search engine and use it by default. So here's how to do it.

1. Find your profile folder.
2. In it, create a folder named "searchplugins" (without the quotes) if it doesn't exists.
3. Save this xml file in it.
4. (Re)start Thunderbird.
5. Select some text in any mail, right clic and search with bing (sorry).
6. Click the DuckDuckGo icon on the left.
7. Click the heart icon on the bottom left.
8. That's all!

To add google, add this file in the same folder.

I recently bought the Alfred.app Powerpack. It is byfar the best application launcher / automation engine I've ever used. One of the new features of the second version of this application is user customizable workflows.

In my daily activities, I start, stop, restart and kill my Glassfish server several times a day. In order to save me a few keystrokes and a few alt-tabbing, I created this small workflow allowing me to manage my local Glassfish instance.

You can find the Alfred worfklow at the following url http://bit.ly/alfred-glassfish. You will probably need to adapt the GF_PATH variable in the script to point to the root of your Glassfish installation.

Once this small step is done, you'll end up with the following prompt in your Alfred :