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Was browsing the MyIE2 forums and found a link to the ieHTTPHeaders plug-in — a plug-in that shows the HTTP and HTTPS headers that are exchanged between whatever web server you’re talking with and your browser. Nice! I’ve used curl and Microsoft’s wFetch which is included in the IIS 6.0 toolkit (see MSKB 284285 for details) but having it integrated into the browser helpls a lot.

BTW, Jonas Blunck (ieHTTPHeaders author) has some interesting tools and links on his site.

With this release MyIE2 has supplanted AvantBrowser as my favorite. They run neck-and-neck and I go back and forth between them.

One feature I look for is the the ability to auto-refresh a page. AvantBrowser has it and MyIE2 has it (Opera’s has it, too, but I’m concentrating on IE-based browsers for the time being). The auto-refresh UI’s a little slicker in AvantBrowser but, operationally, it seems to work just a tiny bit better in MyIE2 — in AvantBrowser the page sometimes will lose focus during an auto-update and at other times the AvantBrowser windows will pop to the front. I don’t seem to have that problem with MyIE2.

Another feature is form-filling. AvantBrowser relies on AI RoboForm for it’s form-filling capabilities whereas you can choose whether to use RoboForm or the form filler that’s integral to MyIE2. RoboForm comes in two flavors: a free one and a paid one and is supposed to be pretty powerful with a lot of bells and whistles even in the free version but, personally, I’ve never had a problem with MyIE2’s built-in support which is why I continue to use it.

A call came in to TheScreenSavers last night from a guy that wanted to start his own ISP. Patrick referred him to the following two sites:

Seattle Wireless
NoCatNet

(Can you tell I’ve been reading the TheScreenSavers daily email update?)

Article is here.

They’re not really the cheapest … the author was looking a notebooks around $1,200 whereas I’ve seen (probably discontinued) HP laptops in Fry’s ads for the last few months at $749 and $799. Still, it’s nice to have another set of opinions around and he looks at some not-so-common notebooks like the Averatec 3150P. And the Gateway 400SP Plus and Winbook J4 are only $800.

urldir has a pretty neat blog comparison tool called BlogComp. At this time you can use it to compare up to 5 of 27 different blogging tools. The list includes b2, Blogger, Movable Type, LiveJournal along with some other very popular ones. Note that it includes hosted services as well as host-your-own.

And while you’re there, take a look at the home page and archives. There’re some interesting links there, too, including a small article about TypePad, the Movable Type folks’ upcoming service based on the Movable Type engine.

Reported by Secunia. Here’s the advisory: http://www.secunia.com/advisories/9076/.

b2 looks like a pretty neat alternative to Movable Type. You need PHP4 and MySQL. I’ll have to check this one out. If anyone has experience with it, please email me.

Found this on the FileForum of BetaNews. Article is here: http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail.php3?fid=990107347.

It’s a rapid application development environment for PHP that includes WYSIWYG. It costs at least $550 if you wanna do full development work ($1,200 if you want Oracle or SQL Server support) but it looks pretty powerful and could speed up development work quite a bit.

Belkin has a new pen that is also a laser pointer, a reading light and a PDA stylus. $19.99 isn’t a bad price for this kinda stuff but it takes 4, count ’em, batteries. It’s called the Quadra.

Reported by BetaNews yesterday, 6/16/2003.

MP3Gain directly adjusts the volume of an MP3 file (as opposed to decoding it, doing peak normalization and reencoding it). Don’t try to do a lot of files at once, though: the analysis and normalization can take quite a while. The BetaNews article is at http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail.php3?fid=1015687834.

The Kerio Personal Firewall V4.0 Beta 4 article is at http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail.php3?fid=1013029502. I’ve used V2 and did some playing around with the V3 betas. I don’t think V3 was ever released and I got tired of using beta firewall code which is why I switched to Sygate Personal Firewall. On the whole, I think I prefer Kerio’s V3 … maybe I’ll give V4 a try. There’s a Yahoo! group for Kerio at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/keriofirewall.