I think I have finally found an answer to programmatically launching the default browser. I’ll get to that in a minute but first I thought I’d tell you why I’m doing this.

As most of you know, I’m pretty paranoid when it comes to email and Internet access. I don’ t like to read my email, for instance, in a web-enabled email client. Too many nasties can sneak past your defenses. I’m not crazy about the protection afforded by accessories external to the main email clients I use (Outlook and Outlook Express) and so I opt to inspect (and often, handle completely) my email through clients that aren’t HTML nor even really web-enabled. Yeah, I know, I’m a throwback, a neanderthal but you just can’t get any safer than that. For the longest time I’ve been using a pure text-mode email client called mutt on my Unix shell account at RawBandwidth. This is a good, safe environment and the email client is under active development so it’s been a pretty good solution. Problem is it can’t render ANY HTML and relies on an external viewer (like lynx) to display anything having HTML in it. One of the shortcomings of such a setup is that when I find an HTML email that I consider “safe,” I can’t easily view it or any of the links in a multimedia browser (like IE or Mozilla or …).

I’ve danced around Pine for quite a few years, never really getting too far in to it … I was happy with mutt. One day I decided to look into it further (probably because a new version became available for Cygwin). Turns out that Pine development has far outstripped what I expected of it. It can display HTML in line-mode but in a form that’s pretty easily understandable. There’s a native Windows PC version and, of course, a version for just about any *nix you care to name (including, I might add, OS X) and they have a fairly recent version on my shell machine. I tried it and, by golly, I like it! Next thing is, naturally, to set it up so I can browse those links in the message I deem “safe.” OK, well, the easiest thing is just to run IE directly. I did that for quite a while but, with all the flipping back and forth between browsers, it became tedious to have a web page come up in IE when I was using Opera or MyIE2. That’s what sent me on my hunt for a way to send a URL to the currently-running browser. You’d think that’d be simple, wouldn’t you? Well, it is simple if you know the trick (ain’t that always the case!).

I was on the right track a few days ago when I asked a few of you if you knew how to do this in VBScript or JScript or a BAT file. My meanderings and Google and Microsoft searches finally led me to ShellExecute — an API function. I’ll go in to the details in the next entry.

Problems in the last solution I posted: URLs that have dollar signs in them don’t parse right. Gotta find another way.

I’ve been searching for a way to do this for a while now and I think I may’ve finally found an answer.

Even though MSKB article 283225 (“HOWTO: Start Internet Explorer from a Java Application”) says it’s osolete, you can still use rundll32 passing 2 parameters: the first being the string (sans quotes) “url.dll,FileProtocolHandler” and the second being the URL you want to browse. I sat up a little test and it seems to work, even if the URL contains spaces or other characters that you would normally expect to require quoting.

MSKB article 174156 (“HOWTO: Programmatically Launch the Default Internet Browser”) documents how to use ShellExecute from VB which ishow the previous KB article says you’re supposed to go about it. I dunno, it just seems like the long way around. I suppose for long-term supportability, though, I should look into this. If anyone has any comments or suggestions, please drop me an email … I can use all the help I can get on this!

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.