Saturday, March 11, 2006

Got Jealous

After Enda prodded me for the 2nd time via e-mail to see if I was alive, I got around to having another look at his and Izzy's page on Get Jealous. It's a great site: a blog specifically for travellers (I mean people on holiday, not the ethnic minority (perhaps there should be one of those too)). You can browse through snaps, read about their adventures and follow their course plotted on a map. And there's a message board so I can still slag him about his beard even when he's on the other side of the world!

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Links to local files with Firefox 1.5

This is a little annoyance that has been bugging me infrequently for a while since I moved to the latest version of Firefox. The default settings for this version and previous ones were to disallow links to local files, presumably because a hacker could write a page with sneaky hidden frames and such to read your system settings.

I mentioned before in my old blog that you could enable local links for all pages in Firefox 1.0.x (can't remember the exact version they put it into). This was all well and good, but obviously caused sleepless nights for a few security conscious nerds because in Firefox 1.5 you can do it on a site-by-site basis (I'll sleep a lot easier now).

Go to the URL about:config.

You can add the following three preferences using right click then selecting New -> String.
You'll have to do this for each preference below:

Preference NameString value
capability.policy.policynameslocalfilelinks
capability.policy.localfilelinks.siteshttp://yourdomain.com
capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabledallAccess


Firefox doesn't show these values on the about:config page even after a restart,
but they do work. You can confirm they have been added by looking at
your prefs.js file. On Windows 2000/XP this is in
Documents and Settings\youruser\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\randomstring.default\prefs.js.

Enter multiple URLs by separating them with a space. For more info including other versions, see Mozillazine.