If you do any sort of web development using Flash or AJAX then you’ve probably dealt with making asynchronous web requests….ones that run behind the scenes. In these type of applications you’ve probably needed to analyze a Web Service request at some point in time. In most situations this is very difficult to do from the client (web browser).

I’ve used LiveHTTPHeaders for FireFox which is a great tool and can save you a tremendous amount of time when debugging applications. It runs as a plugin and can be integrated easily into your debugging workflow.

Today I stumbled across the same type of plugin for IE called ieHTTPHeaders. We ran into an interesting situation at work where something worked perfectly in FireFox, but was completely broken in IE. This tool proved extremely useful and saved me a good amount of debugging time.

I highly recommend both plugins and even if you’re not into development it’s cool to watch what goes on underneath the hood.

I received a few emails today saying that my GolfTips widget was broken. It turns out I was having a server issue that I didn’t even know about (until I received the emails). Everything should be back up and running again. Please let me know if this isn’t the case and I’ll look into the problem further.

I’ve been slacking on development, but plan on releasing an update in the coming weeks so please stay tuned!

After only a few short days with my Cingular 8125 I continue to be fascinated with Windows Mobile 2005.  I recently stumbled across Pocket Putty and was immediately hooked.  While the application is fairly simple (not to belittle the developer at all), it’s extremely powerful.  It basically lets me open an SSH session with my Linux server and issue commands.  It’s identical to opening an SSH session from your desktop, except you can do it while driving, walking out to check the mail, and any other place you can imagine.

A quick note to the developer, I know how difficult in can be to make money from mobile applications.  This is an application that I would pay anywhere from $15-$25 for.  The reality is it will help people be more efficient and available with managing their servers.  It can be done from almost anywhere (although I’ve only done it over WiFi and not GPRS yet) if a problem arises.  There’s a level of confidence you have when knowing the solution to your next problem resides in your pocket.  Another note to the developer, if you decide to keep it free I’m cool with that too

While working through an application that allows users to upload videos to the web I ran into a few problems. For starters, there’s no guarantee that obscene videos won’t be uploaded into the application. The integrity of the application will be dependent on members of the community. Or an editorial process could be implemented where videos are reviewed and published upont approval. I wonder if that’s what Google is doing.

At any rate, the purpose of this post is a simple one-liner (most great Ruby on Rails helpers are one-liners) that simplified my development. Not only that, it ensured the types of files being uploaded were videos and nothing else. Rails has access to file metadata and one field in particular known as content_type. In my Rails model I was able to do validation with this method:

validates_format_of :content_type, :with => /^video/, :message => “Only video files are supported”

After testing with .3GPP and .MOV files it worked beautifully. I’m sure the same will hold true for .AVI, .MPG, and .WMV. This method looks for any content-type that is prefixed with video. For example, a Quicktime movie has the content type of video/quicktime. Rails supports all sorts of different validators and I’m looking forward to digging into them.

I stumbled across Mini Mozilla this evening and wanted to share it here:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/

It’s crazy to see desktop applications get ported to a lightweight platform.  I haven’t installed it yet since I’m having problems installing the CAB file directly.  If tabbed browsing is supported then I’ll consider ditching Pocket IE.