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Have you played an adventure game? A typical setting is a castle with many rooms. You are in a room with a locked door and a chalice. You pick up the chalice and take it to a room on the opposite end of the castle. There you capture to parakeet in the chalice (anything other than what you expect a chalice to do). You take the parakeet to another distant room where it flies into the rafters to retrieve a key. You return to the same room you started in and open the door with the key. Sometime you have to take the long way around to get to where you wanted to go. Today, I want to implement dragging a graphic in JavaScript. I have a small html file and graphic on my desktop that I am going to use to develop the code. IE8 throws up a warning because I am trying to run JavaScript on my local file system. Because I expect to go through many iterations, I want to eliminate this error message. Trying to set my local file system as a "Trusted site" is an exercise in futility. I keep getting syntax errors on the patterns for trusted sites. I have a local IIS web server running so I put my code in the path of the web server and then access it via http. This should work but doesn't. After some investigation, it turns out that IIS is not running. Some more investigation reveals that the reason is that some other process is blocking access to port 80. It is not obvious what that process is from task manager so I reboot. After reboot, the blockage is still there. I have collected some networking tools from XP in a directory so I fire up netstat. Netstat will not run. I upgrade the tools from windows\system32 since it is much easier doing network work from a small list of tools rather than dig them out of the 2930 entries in system32. I finally run netstat -a -b to discovery Skype is holding port 80. Huh? SKYPE is holding port 80 ... ?! There must be some mistake. After digging around Skype, I see that it has an option to back up its listening port with 80 and 443. I uncheck that and now IIS can be started running. Running on a web server locally does not bring up a warning. But this seems so clunky and what I really want is to develop and run test code on my computer. Microsoft advises that you can put the mark of the web (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537628(VS.85).aspx) in an online page but this is a total kludge. If running web pages on my local machine is a screaming security hazard, how is it any safer because there is some non-standard markup in the page ... ?? It is just pointless extra work for doing quick and dirty development coding. A non-microsoft page gives a much better answer. In Tools >> Internet Options >> Advanced >> Security, check the box labeled "Allow active content to run in files on My Computer". Great, I have made a tour of the castle and unlocked the door in the room I started in. The exercise did have some side benefit. IIS is now running, I have a working directory of network tools, and the warning which comes up running files on my computer is now turned off. This last one is especially nice because I have seen the message issued in error. This happens all the time going to my home page after viewing a web page with active content (my home page is plain-vanilla html with no styles or script).
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