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Add “My Dropbox” option to XP Start Menu

November 12th, 2010 | Posted by mvi in Team 6 | Web - (0 Comments)

I’ve spent the last 20 minutes adding the option of “My Dropbox” to the start menu on XP. So here’s a quick guide on how to do it.

Firstly, it seems that you can only place the option below the Run option, unless you want it to take the place of My Pictures for example.

To do this, you’ll need to do some minor registry editing. This was my source, I changed the registry code to:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{2559a1f6-21d7-11d4-bdaf-00c04f60b9f0}]
@=”My Dropbox”
“InfoTip”=”Opens the My Dropbox folder”
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{2559a1f6-21d7-11d4-bdaf-00c04f60b9f0}\DefaultIcon]
@=”C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAMEHERE\Application Data\Dropbox\bin\Dropbox_101.ico”
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{2559a1f6-21d7-11d4-bdaf-00c04f60b9f0}\Instance\InitPropertyBag]
“method”=”ShellExecute”
“Command”=”My Dropbox”
“Param1″=”C:\\Documents and Settings\\USERNAMEHERE\\My Documents\\My Dropbox”

Note that you need to change the bold tags to your username. Also to generate the Dropbox icon, I downloaded IconExtract and selected the Dropbox.exe running process, scrolled down the presenetd list of icons and picked out the one I liked most. Ensure that the icon file path and filename above mirrors what you want. I decided to put my icon where the dropbox exe is hidden, remember in XP that the Application Data folder is hidden by default, so you’ll have to go into settings to turn on “Show hidden and system files/folders” or paste in the folder’s path and hit enter. Another note is, if you sort out the icon later, explorer.exe may need restarting if you just see a missing icon image.

Some thoughts on static web security

August 8th, 2010 | Posted by mvi in Web - (0 Comments)

While web development is something I tend not to do, but despite that have somehow done quite a lot over the years (I’m still trying to figure that one out,) I was having a think about web security the other day. Now, with so many various web content management systems and forum scripts, it’s not surprising the amount of vulnerabilites they tend to accumulate.

Now many websites are essentially static content, but run content management systems because of the powerful functionality they leverage and how easy they make it to modify your site content. But as these systems become older and aren’t updated, there’s a tendency for the security vulnerabilities to be uncovered and exploited. So my thoughts were, how about securing the CMS really tightly (.htaccess and IP range locking, or whatever takes your fancy) and then bake the essentially generated PHP (for example) files to public html files whenever a change is made. The scripts which are susceptible to exploitation are locked away more securely than they would be otherwise. Just a musing.