Napkins and Information Security

Security Breach!

I was recently dinged in an office security check for not locking a desk drawer in my cubicle. In my defense, I had locked all drawers that contained any company documents, but apparently my judgment was incorrect in leaving another drawer unlocked.

However, in the spirit of the WikiLeaks controversy, I will now publish a summary of the sensitive contents of the drawer in question. 

• Chipotle napkins -- clearly these napkins have crossed the border illegally
• Plastic forks -- obviously weapons
• Salt, Pepper, Wendy's Hot Chili Seasoning -- biochemical weapons
• Assorted US Coinage -- likely utilized in nefarious deals for the above-mentioned weapons
• Soy Sauce -- evidence of working with the Chinese
• Tong's Thai Menu --  Note: certain contents of this sensitive foreign correspondence have been redacted to protect the general public, especially those items marked "***3 Hot", "****4 Very hot", and "*****5 Extreme Hot".

I am conferring with the New York Times on whether to disclose further information which may prove harmful to the fast-food industry.

Tridion Template Builder Link Not Working

For months I have been annoyed by the fact that I could not open Template Builder from the SDL Tridion 5.3 Content Manager by clicking on the Template Builder link within the Custom Pages section.  I had to look at the source code and try to figure out where the browser was redirecting me and then manually put the URL in the browser's address bar.

Turns out, Internet Explorer silently threw away the request for the resource with no indication that it was being blocked.  That status bar even said "No items are being blocked on this page".  IE you never fail to disappoint!  Thanks for looking out for us, but at least tell us what you're doing!

The problem is that Internet Explorer must be specially configured to allow the opening of ClickOnce applications via scripting.  I found the solution in an MSDN article that said:

If you have developed a custom Web page that launches a ClickOnce application using Active Scripting, you may find that the application will not launch on some machines. Internet Explorer contains a setting called Automatic prompting for file downloads, which affects this behavior. This setting is available on the Security Tab in its Options menu that affects this behavior. It is called Automatic prompting for file downloads, and it is listed underneath the Downloads category. The property is set to Enable by default for intranet Web pages, and to Disable by default for Internet Web pages. When this setting is set to Disable, any attempt to activate a ClickOnce application programmatically (for example, by assigning its URL to the document.location property) will be blocked. Under this circumstance, users can launch applications only through a user-initiated download, for example, by clicking a hyperlink set to the application's URL.

This post is mostly a reminder to myself because I will inevitably forget what I did to fix it, but maybe it will help someone else who has been equally bothered with this minor annoyance.

Query-String-Based Apache Authentication

The <Location>, <LocationMatch>, <Directory> and <DirectoryMatch> Apache directives allow us to apply authentication/authorization to specific patterns of resources with a high degree of specificity, but do not give us that control down to the query-string level.  Today we learn how to use mod_rewrite, environment variables, and the Satisfy directive to allow us to attain that goal!

Automatically Redirect Gmail Links to Google Apps in Firefox

Being a Google Apps user, I have to deal with a minor irritation when using other non-Google-Apps services from Google. Google provides those tantalizing links at the top of the search page and in other tools such as Google Reader to link you off to "Mail" or "Calendar". These links look just like the those you have in your Google Apps interface. This is great and convenient, but they won't take you to your Google Apps email and Calendar.

I thought I might have to resort to some greasemonkey script or something similar to resolve this annoyance; however, I found a Firefox add-on that will redirect me to where I really want to go. Here's how to set it up: