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Amazon to customer: $3B charge may stand as record | NetworkWorld.com Community

2010 Jan 6, 9:20"Amazon called me today to discuss my $2.9billion purchase"PermalinkCommentshumor amazon web internet economics money

Public Domain Day

2010 Jan 6, 3:41Public Domain Day sounds neat. Not just celebrating the public domain but celebrating new works now available in the public domain every Jan 1st. But we'll have to wait at least nine years to celebrate in the US. We need to get the copyright lifetime to match up with retro things regaining popularity -- like when big band music was briefly popular again.PermalinkCommentscopyright ip public-domain law legal

WPAD Server Fiddler Extension

2010 Jan 5, 7:42

I've made a WPAD server Fiddler extension and in a fit of creativity I've named it: WPAD Server Fiddler Extension.

Of course you know about Fiddler, Eric's awesome HTTP debugger tool, the HTTP proxy that lets you inspect, visualize and modify the HTTP traffic that flows through it. And on the subject you've probably definitely heard of WPAD, the Web Proxy Auto Discovery protocol that allows web browsers like IE to use DHCP or DNS to automatically discover HTTP proxies on their network. While working on a particularly nasty WPAD bug towards the end of IE8 I really wished I had a way to see the WPAD requests and responses and modify PAC responses in Fiddler. Well the wishes of me of the past are now fulfilled by present day me as this Fiddler extension will respond to WPAD DHCP requests telling those clients (by default) that Fiddler is their proxy.

When I started working on this project I didn't really understand how DHCP worked especially with respect to WPAD. I won't bore you with my misconceptions: it works by having your one DHCP server on your network respond to regular DHCP requests as well as WPAD DHCP requests. And Windows I've found runs a DHCP client service (you can start/stop it via Start|Run|'services.msc', scroll to DHCP Client or via the command line with "net start/stop 'DHCP Client'") that caches DHCP server responses making it just slightly more difficult to test and debug my extension. If a Windows app uses the DHCP client APIs to ask for the WPAD option, this service will send out a DHCP request and take the first DHCP server response it gets. That means that if you're on a network with a DHCP server, my extension will be racing to respond to the client. If the DHCP server wins then the client ignores the WPAD response from my extension.

Various documents and tools I found useful while working on this:

PermalinkCommentsproxy fiddler http technical debug wpad pac tool dhcp

Make: Online : Hack the box to get to the phone

2009 Dec 31, 4:40"Nokia has been struggling a bit this year, but this "hack it" to get your phone unboxing is pretty interesting. Once you "root" the box it opens up and a little puff of smoke appears, along with your phone (if you're a phone / gadget reviewer)." Makes me wonder how many devs and engineers they had working on the box to contain this phone.PermalinkCommentsphone video cellphone hack

Company Holiday Party Photo

2009 Dec 19, 3:23

sequelguy posted a photo:

Company Holiday Party Photo

Sarah & me at her company holiday party.

PermalinkCommentsparty holiday me sarah work company

Get cached images from your visitors | Diovo

2009 Dec 15, 2:01"Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror fame) was in for a horror when he realized that his server crashed and his data was gone and due to some reason, the backup mechanism was not working. ... So what should Jeff do now? Since Coding horror is a high traffic blog, I think there is a way to get back at least some of the images." Reconstruct the HTML from Google's cache, change the HTTP server to tell the client it has the correct cached image for all the images, add script to the HTML to grab the images and send them back. Awesome idea. Of course now I want to setup Fiddler to swap in random images...PermalinkCommentsvia:ericlaw jeff-atwood backup web http cache image javascript technical

Android eBook Reader And Makers

2009 Dec 13, 1:27

I was reading Makers, Cory Doctorow's latest novel, as it was serialized on Tor's website but with no ability to save my place within a page I set out to find a book reading app for my G1 Android phone. I stopped looking once I found Aldiko. Its got bookmarks within chapters, configurable fonts, you can look-up words in a dictionary, and has an easy method to download public domain and creative common books. I was able to take advantage of Aldiko's in-app book download system to get Makers onto my phone so I didn't have to bother with any conversion programs etc, and I didn't have to worry about spacing or layout, the book had the correct cover art, and chapter delimiters. I'm very happy with this app and finished reading Makers on it.

Makers is set in the near future and features teams of inventors, networked 3d printers, IP contention, body modifications, and Disney -- just the sort of thing you'd expect from a Cory Doctorow novel. The tale seems to be an allegory for the Internet including displacing existing businesses and the conflict between the existing big entertainment IP owners and the plethora of fans and minor content producers. The story is engaging and the characters filled out and believable. I recommend Makers and as always its Creative Commons so go take a look right now.

PermalinkCommentstor aldiko cory doctorow g1 makers ebook android book

RFC 2132 - DHCP Options and BOOTP Vendor Extensions

2009 Dec 12, 2:42"The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) [1] provides a framework for passing configuration information to hosts on a TCP/IP network. Configuration parameters and other control information are carried in tagged data items that are stored in the 'options' field of the DHCP message. The data items themselves are also called "options.""PermalinkCommentstechnical reference rfc dhcp ietf ipv4 ip

Artist Shopdropped Her Work on Black Friday – Neatorama

2009 Dec 8, 1:54'As crowds rushed to find deals at the Emeryville, CA IKEA store, one of them had a plan other than shopping. Michelle Pred was actually placing her artwork, complete with working IKEA barcodes, into the inventory, an act she calls “shopdropping.”'PermalinkCommentscultural-disobediance shopdropping art ikea barcode

Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Language Detection: A Witch’s Brew?

2009 Dec 4, 10:24Flickr dev. blog on the accept-language HTTP header: "It’s true that the Accept-Language header has a troubled history. Because of this, many developers regard it the way medieval villagers might have regarded a woman with a warty nose and a pet cat – it should be shunned, avoided and possibly burned at the stake." And this great anecdote: "In two and a half years of running as an international site, we’ve only ever had one case where it didn’t work. Helio, a cellphone company, had a browser was custom-built for them in Korea, and had its “Accept-Language” header hard-coded to always request Korean, something which led to much confusion for the Flickr users amongst their American customers."PermalinkCommentsflickr internationalization language accept-language http http-header development technical web

Google Public DNS

2009 Dec 3, 4:52Having replaced HTTP with SPDY, Google digs deeper into the Web stack providing their own DNS servers. Also, as Waxy noted, you can't argue with the most memorable IP addresses I've seen: "Configure your network settings to use the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers". Also check out their DNS server's DNS prefetching in the performance notes.PermalinkCommentsgoogle dns internet network security performance dns-prefetching technical

Aza’s Thoughts » Identity in the Browser (Firefox)

2009 Nov 30, 6:31"At Mozilla Labs, we’ve been working on some potential integrations of identity directly into the browser. Note, this is an extremely rough draft." Looks pretty!PermalinkCommentsfirefox browser identity web mozilla security authentication openid

PLoS ONE: Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science

2009 Nov 23, 11:33A map of the sciences generated via science web portals: "Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia...The resulting model was visualized as a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains and clarifies the connection of the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences."PermalinkCommentsvia:pskomoroch visualization science map graph

John Resig - Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer

2009 Nov 19, 3:46A free tool dynaTrace Ajax provides "full tracing analysis of Internet Explorer 6-8 (including JavaScript, rendering, and network traffic)". Looks pretty too...PermalinkCommentsie ie6 ie7 ie8 performance web http html javascript browser technical

301Works

2009 Nov 13, 6:36Hooray for the Internet Archive! "The Internet Archive and founding companies announce today the launch of 301Works.org, a service to archive shortened Universal Resource Locators (URLs). This will enable redirect services to incorporate these shortened URLs when a member company ceases business activities."PermalinkCommentsurl http redirect internet web internet-archive archive via:waxy technical

YouTube - The Web That Wasn't

2009 Oct 28, 8:31"The presentation will focus on the pioneering work of Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Doug Engelbart, forebears of the 1960s and 1970s like Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and the Xerox PARC team, and more recent forays like Brown's Intermedia system." Covers things like As We May Think and others who could have made the Web. Would love to have this as a summary with links to everything rather than a video =)PermalinkCommentsvia:connolly technical google video internet web information technology memex

Map/Reduce Tutorial

2009 Oct 6, 3:24The map/reduce tutorial for Hadoop the Apache open source project. "Hadoop Map/Reduce is a software framework for easily writing applications which process vast amounts of data (multi-terabyte data-sets) in-parallel on large clusters (thousands of nodes) of commodity hardware in a reliable, fault-tolerant manner."PermalinkCommentshadoop mapreduce java software programming opensource database distributed google yahoo apache technical todo

HD DVD / Randomness... : Why not use hashes for the Anti-Phishing Filter?

2009 Sep 30, 4:07The hashing part makes sense, but not the 'why no URL query' bit: "But because victim=12345 has already been visited they satisfy condition 2 and they get the 404 page fooling them into thinking the site has already been taken down. So query strings don't really work." You could implement the same thing in the path and even were that not the case there's no telling that removing the query would get you the same page. What's described here is a general method to circumvent the AP filter not an explaination as to why it avoids the query portion of the URL.PermalinkCommentsphishing technical web browser http url hash

Zork rock anthem - Boing Boing

2009 Sep 29, 10:26Zork walkthrough as song works pretty well actually.PermalinkCommentsmusic mp3 free zork if interactive-fiction game videogame

Joho the Blog » Broadband. Trust them.

2009 Sep 25, 5:18"The closest the organization comes to stating its actual intent is in the wording of the print ad they’re running. Hmm. On the open medium of the Internet the organization hides its purpose, but in the controlled medium of print, they come close to stating it. How unexpected!"PermalinkCommentsnet-neutrality network-neutrality network internet broadband isp cable humor
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