== Every so often, I solve a problem with a hammer

For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I maintain a special
Firefox profile and instance for uploading pictures to [[my Flickr
account http://www.flickr.com/photos/22276923@N06/]]. Back in the
old days, Firefox had a very convenient behavior for this: when it
asked you to choose files to upload in an upload form, the default
directory was the current directory that you'd started Firefox
in. This meant that I could _cd_ to the day's photo directory, start
my Flickr Firefox instance, and have [[the GTK file chooser dialog
../programming/GnomeFileChoserProblem]] start in exactly the right
directory. Then at some point Firefox changed this so that the default
file chooser directory was something like your configured download
directory.

I poked at this off and on but couldn't find a way to make Firefox get
its old behavior back.  So recently I decided to fix the problem with
brute force. The script that I use to start my Flickr Firefox instance
now looks somewhat like this:

>  #!/bin/sh
>  ln -nsf $(pwd) $HOME/CURDIR
>  exec firefox -P flickr "$@"

This is inelegant and not a real solution, but it makes things a lot
more convenient; it's now much faster to navigate to exactly where I
want to be. Sometimes that's the right way to deal with a problem, when
either the real solution is too much work or the problem is too small to
justify anything more than a quick hack.

(I suppose that this could be slightly improved by putting the
symlink directly in the download subdirectory. I'm not sure why I
didn't do that.)