Harry Bailey

If you’re a web developer and you can only get the first Virtual Host to work in your new Apache 2 local setup, it’s very simple to resolve.

Thanks to Alex King for the solution to fix Apache 2 only serving the first virtual host.

Basically the NameVirtualHost must match the value you use in your virtual host declaration, be it *, 1.2.3.4 or example.local

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
</VirtualHost>

You get the gist.

I’ve lost count of the number of times i’ve seen this bit of HTML / PHP:

<form method="post" action="<?php print $_SERVER['PHP_SELF"]; ?>">

Looks pretty harmless doesn’t it, but it is a pretty dangerous shortcut to use. Imagin I get a user to visit the page the form is on by following this link, maybe hiding it in a short url:

http://example.com/formpage.php?"><script>alert(document.cookie);</script>

where I’ve added some html into the url which contains a script tag.

I could use this method to grab all your cookies and log in as you, or send ajax requests back to the site on your behalf. All very frightening. The quick solution is to turn html characters into their harmless entities using the php function htmlspecialchars. So the code would be

<form method="post" action="<?php print htmlspecialchars($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']); ?>">

But wait! The best way to submit to the same page with a form is to use and empty action attribute. It’s valid and it works.

<form method="post" action="">

Don’t believe me? Go tell Jesse. He also wrote about empty action attributes.

So it appears that Microsoft have based a whole tv advert on their new ’snap’ feature.

US: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmiPzMY4nuE

UK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnolmuFgW7w

Continue Reading… »

To backup your Postbox email profile browse to

Mac:
/Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/Postbox/Profiles

Vista:
Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Postbox

XP:
Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Postbox

And copy the folders named xxxxxx.default to your backup location.
If you have created a new profile then your folder may also be called xxxxx.yourprofilename.

If you just want to backup your email and not your preferences or settings then go into your profile folders and backup the Imap, Mail and sometimes Local Mail folders

You can easily change ‘Harry wrote:’ to ‘On 25/09/09 15:34 Harry Bailey replied with:’ by following these simple steps.

Close Postbox. That’s right, shut it down before you carry on.

Backup and then open your prefs.js profile file which can be found here:

Mac OS X: ~/Library/Application Support/Postbox
Vista: Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Postbox
WinXP: Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Postbox

You backed it up? No? Do it now and then carry on.

Now search for the string ‘mailnews.reply_header_type’. Found it? Edit it to the following. Not found it? Add the following…

// Change the reply header
// 0 - No Reply-Text
// 1 - "[Author] wrote:"
// 2 - "On [date] [author] wrote:"
// 3 - User-defined reply header. Use the prefs below in conjunction with this:
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_type", 3);
 
// If you set 3 for the pref above then you may set the following prefs.
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote", "%s replied with");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_ondate", "On %s");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_separator", " ");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_colon", ":"); 
// The end result will be [authorwrote][separator][ondate][colon]

Now you can go crazy with funny reply header text whenever you feel the need.