One of the things that I love about living in a Unix environment is that 99% of the time, remote administration only means a quick trip to the console. That's 99% of the time where my desktop can look something like this: Of course, 99% doesn't quite make a whole. There's the matter of the other 1% of the time where a GUI is required. Earlier on in my journey with Linux, I would have tried to setup a VNC server or to work around the need for a UI.…

This weekend I spent some time migrating my Minecraft server a good 700 miles closer to my house. The new server is ~30 milliseconds closer. If you play games, you probably know how huge that can be. So, how did I move data to the new server? FTP, right? No. Definitely no. Why not FTP? FTP is plain-text Unless you're using something like FTPS, you'll be sending your server credentials across the wire in plain text, so anyone sitting between you and your new server has all the info they need to login.…

A little while back I spent some time looking at an interesting issue with a colleage. He was trying to load a virtual machine from an .OVA but kept recieving error messages as he loaded it that the file was invalid. Somehow though, other people used the same file. This one could be fun to diagnose. To start with, the premise of our argument has a problem: it wasn't the same file but rather a copy of the file.…

In the first six parts of our series, we examined some of the power that Fiddler has to offer us: we covered remote debugging, composing requests, breakpoints, autoresponders, plugins, and a bit of FiddlerScript. So what's next? There's still an incredible amount that Fiddler can do, but despite the “Land Before Time”-esque post names, this was never meant to be a comprehensive Fiddler feature tutorial. The series was just meant to cover some of Fiddler's most powerful yet underused features; specifically features that have gotten me out of a bind a time or two.…

Our tour of Fiddler has covered a lot of ground so far, and while there's still more to cover, I'm going to have to let you in on a secret before we can continue. The UI is definitely powerful, but here's the thing: it's not the killer feature. The real killer feature is FiddlerScript. Getting Started Fiddler already detects invalid requests and broken responses. What more could we possibly add, you might ask.…

The more time I spend examining Fiddler, the more and more impressed I am. Not only is it feature rich out of the box, but it includes a number of mechanism to easily extend it. This week we're going to focus on the easiest way to add new functionality: installing new plugins. All of the following plugins are available at Telerik.com. I highly recommend installing them. JavaScript Formatter The first plugin, and my personal favorite, was introduced to me a few years ago by Joey Robichaud.…

Over the last few years I've grown rather accustomed to listening to my Pandora while working, even upgrading to PandoraOne so that I can enjoy my music without interruptions 1. However, I found myself avoiding Pandora earlier this year. Why? Pandora uses Flash for the web and Air for the desktop, presumably in order to annihilate the battery on my laptop. 2 The problem isn't Pandora though, it's Flash. What if I could use Pandora without Flash?…

Guy at the far left barely gets wet. Oh, that's me. Well, that works.…

Last week we figured out how to use Fiddler's breakpoints to let us edit traffic at will. While it is a powerful tool, if we are making the same edits each time, it can become as tedious as it is useful. And with that rather painful segue, we get to the AutoResponder. Fiddler's AutoResponder is represented by yet another tab hiding away in our detail view. When enabled, it can, among other things, automatically return a response for a given request.…

One of the great things about using an API is that it implies that I can use functionality that I don't have to write myself. I can write an app that live tweets driving directions between two random Yelp reviews without ever having to directly know how the tweeting or directing is taking place. As long as I stick to the API, I can pretty much accept that the API's functionality should usually “just work”.…