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…
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.
Tonight we put the finishing touches on Yahoo Messenger 7.5, launching the final client and updating the Messenger websites for 16 countries at once! These days, “beta” launches get all the attention and when you eventually ship the final version, there isn’t much fanfare. Regardless, for the team that worked on a seemingly endless stream of details to work out, this was a big accomplishment. My kids often ask me what I mean when I say “we’re doing a launch tonight”. I think they have visions of a mission to Mars, but the world of software development isn’t always that…
Several software applications provide feedback forms in case of an error or crash (Windows, Firefox, etc.). Today I was browsing a blog that had an embedded VideoEgg player and it popped up a unique error report, requesting help and offering a free t-shirt for helping them track down the problem: I like this ordergenericpropeciaonline.com/ approach. It’s very hard for developers of free consumer applications to track down and solve reported “crash” problems in the field. At Palm we had a couple cases where we contacted individual users and did remote troubleshooting with them. I think we sent them some free…
Back in December, we launched the public beta of Yahoo! Messenger 7.5 in eight countries. The significant new feature is PSTN (aka regular phone network) support, both to and from regular phone lines. That launch was kind of different for us because, although we did launch a US-English client, the service was not available inside the United States. Tonight we did a beta refresh and officially launched the US service as well. Compared to other launches I’ve been through on this team, this one was pretty smooth. Having the service actually available here in the US should be a big…