Fix: Firefox tries to navigate to "www.localhost.com"

I was having a problem at work last week where when I would point Firefox to http://localhost/, it would instead try to navigate to http://www.localhost.com/.

The problem ended up being related to the settings for my proxy server. I was able to fix the problem on my machine by adding "localhost" to the list of hosts for which Firefox bypasses the proxy server.

In Firefox 2.0, you can do this by going to Tools | Options | Advanced | Network tab and clicking the "Settings..." button in the "Connection" section on the dialog. Then, in the Connection Settings dialog, in the "No Proxy For" field, type localhost. (The new value should be separated from other host names that are already present in the field, if there are any, by a comma.)

Note that this solution is most likely only applicable if you are using a proxy server to connect to the Internet (i.e. if the "Manual proxy configuration" radio button on the Connection Settings dialog is checked).

PathFind.exe 2.0 released

I've updated my PathFind utility to version 2.0. PathFind.exe is a command-line utility which shows you all of the copies of a particular file that are present on your path (per the PATH environment variable). The functionality is similar to the which command for Unix/Linux.

PathFind.exe is useful to check which version of a particular program (such as ildasm.exe) will run when you run the program from the command line. (The first copy of the program present on the path will be the one that runs, assuming a copy of the program isn't also present in the current working directory.)

Version 2.0 of the utility supports use of the cmd.exe * and ? wildcards for searching. For example, pathfind java*.exe would return all instances of java.exe and javac.exe (among others) on the path, whereas pathfind ????? would return all files with 5-character filenames on the path.

2.0 continues to support automatic extension searching based on the PATHEXT environment variable when no "." character or wildcard characters are specified, so pathfind iisreset will show you where iisreset.exe is located.

You can download it directly from this link: PathFind 2.0 (5k). Requires the .Net Framework 2.0 or higher to be installed.

Congratulations, Jeremy!

My younger brother Jeremy has been named to the 2007 Crain's Detroit Business "20 in their 20s", a group of young movers and shakers in Detroit-area business, for his role as founder and president of RentLinx, a free online apartment listings service!

Congratulations, Jeremy!