Using Fiddler to Debug HTTP

Another interesting entry on Coding Horror talks about Fiddler: I’ve had great success using ethernet sniffers (such as Etherdetect, or Ethereal) to troubleshoot communication problems. … However, Windows ethernet sniffers do have one significant limitation: they can’t sniff localhost traffic. Localhost packets don’t pass through the regular network stack, so they’re invisible to an ethernet sniffer. What’s a poor developer to do? The only recourse is a local HTTP proxy, such as Fiddler. I didn’t realize that Fiddler can work around the “localhost” limitation with tools like Ethereal, but have found myself using Fiddler more and more often lately for…

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Spaces, Underscores and Dashes

From Coding Horror, a summary explanation of choosing between spaces, underscores, and dashes: So it behooves us to use something other than a space in file and folder names. Historically, I’ve used underscore, but I recently discovered that the correct character to substitute for space is the dash. Why? In many contexts it seems that the underscore is actually treated as a word character, combining rather than separating words. He has some interesting examples using \w in regular expressions. His examples are from RegexBuddy, but you might also look at Regex Coach which is free.

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Home Sweet Home

This week Yahoo! is unveiling a public preview of the new home page design. The whole look and feel is new, which you’d expect with the periodic redesigns of this page, but what’s really cool is all the interactivity. If you’re signed in, the module in the upper right (not sure what it’s called) gives you snapshot views of your Mail, Messenger buddies, Radio, Weather, Local, and Movies. It doesn’t (yet) have the customizability of My Yahoo, but the UI alone make the My page look antiquated. The Yahoo! User Interface blog has a good summary of many UI patterns…

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