Fiddler PowerToy – Powerful HTTP Debugging in IE

Internet Explorer Developer Center: Fiddler PowerToy – Part 1: HTTP Debugging
Have you ever found yourself wondering how Microsoft Internet Explorer interacts with your Web application? Have you encountered a strange performance bottleneck that you can’t track down? Are you curious about which cookies are being sent, or what downloaded content is marked as cacheable?

Microsoft Fiddler can help you answer these questions, and many more. Fiddler is an HTTP debugging proxy that logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler enables you to inspect all HTTP traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler is much simpler to use than NetMon or other network debuggers because it exposes only HTTP traffic and does so in a user-friendly format.

Fiddler includes a simple but powerful Microsoft JScript .NET event-based scripting subsystem flexible enough to support a broad array of HTTP debugging tasks. Written in C# on the Microsoft .NET Framework, Fiddler is available as an unsupported PowerToy for Internet Explorer.

Does a lot of the things that the developer extenisons to Firefox do, but as a system proxy. You can even set Firefox to proxy thru it to get the same info. It is interesting to see the way sites can react to the different browsers. Download Fiddler here.

Rich McCue Releases OpenExpert

[teknoids] OpenExpert 0.1.1 release
OpenExpert.org (http://www.openexpert.org/) is a web based, easy to use Expert System. It is being developed by the University of Victoria Legal Clinic as a diagnostic / teaching tool to help students navigate technical areas of the law (such a divorce), more quickly, and with fewer mistakes. That said, the project is still under heavy development, with new features being added, and refinements being made. Please see the roadmap for the project for further details on planned features and enhancements (http://www.openexpert.org/documentation/roadmap.html). You can see a demo of the system here: http://www.openexpert.org/demo/

Rich is a friend of ours and a frequent Teknoids poster. He demoed this project last June at the CALI Conference. It is cool and I can think of a thing or two to do with now that I have the code:)

The Freshmeat announcement is here and the SourceForge summary is here.

Knoppix 3.8 Adds UnionFS, More Flexibility

Knoppix 3.8 and UnionFS. Wow. Just Wow.
Klaus has released the latest version of Knoppix, 3.8, to the crowd at CeBIT 2005. This version includes the normal round of updates including the 2.6.11 kernel by default, KDE 3.3.2, and Firefox and Thunderbird instead of Mozilla. The exciting news, however, is the addition of UnionFS. UnionFS stacks your Knoppix ramdisk on top of the read-only filesystem on the CD, the effect being that you can apt-get install, and otherwise modify all of the files on the system as though they were all writeable. Here I’ll go over why I think this is going to change Knoppix in a major way.

Of course it doesn’t appear that Knoppix 3.8 is actually available for download yet. I hope it is released soon since it sounds a good idea to build CALIoppix 2 on top of this.