I was hunting and pecking around the web for a photo of fellow science blogger Mike Dunford, whom I had met at SciBlog2008. Obviously, I knew his Authority blog address, but the picture on there was showing blank. More than that, when I right clicked and tried to view the image itself, the page came up blank and showed this address – http://127.0.0.1:1025/clear.cgi?

I thought maybe it’s just a glitch, and went to Google Images to search for Mike’s mugshot there…but, it seems all the images there were blank too and point to that same “http://127.0.0.1:1025/clear.cgi?” address.

Now, I know 127.0.0.1 is a loopback address for the localhost, i.e. your own computer, rather than it being an internet address, so I assumed it was a ZoneAlarm firewall issue, it was somehow looping back instead of pinging the correct address and displaying the image. So, I temporarily disabled the firewall. No luck. I remembered that I also have a Firefox addon running that disables all animated gifs, it may have been that for Mike’s blog, but Google Images, no, they’re static thumbnails only.

Next step was to try in other browsers Firefox having failed. IE – no go, Opera – nada, Google Chrome – no luck…at first, but then it worked and there was Mike in all his glory.

Anyway, I was still confused about this strange URL in the address bar, so I did a quick search for “http://127.0.0.1:1025/clear.cgi?” in Google which brought up a few hits, but all in Russian, German or another language beyond my grasp, although Google translation did a reasonable job in revealing that others were suffering the same problem but had found no solution. Ditto with a search on 127.0.0.1:1025/clear.cgi? without the http:// bit..

Back in Firefox, a right-click “Save As…” of Mike’s photo on his blog revealed that the image is called “profile.jpg.gif”. Now, that’s odd in itself, it cannot be both and if it’s a jpg with the gif file extension, it’s possible that the browser is simply getting confused and finding itself unable to render the image returning the 127.0.0.1 link instead for some strange reason. However, attempting to open profile.jpg.gif in an image editor just revealed a blank, black square and not Mike’s features. Like I say, his site’s fine in Google Chrome, so it has to be something peculiar to Firefox…time for a reboot I think.