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Fiddler – monitor HTTP requests from your browser

Fiddler is invaluable for monitoring HTTP requests from your browser. If you’re investigating HTTP header usage and the effort on caching static content, Fiddler is definitely the way to go, since using the Developer Tools in IE, Chrome or FireBug in Firefox don’t always give you an accurate picture of the actual outgoing HTTP requests. IE is the worst… its developer tool shows HTTP requests going out even though the files are being retrieved from cache. If you really want to see what’s going on then you need something like Fiddler.

To review requests against a server running locally (against localhost), there’s a number of tips in the docs here, but the simplest approach seems to be to use your own IP address (actual address, not 127.0.0.1) instead of localhost or any of the other approaches listed on this page. It works without any other changes.

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Installing VirtualBox Guest Additions for a CentOS Guest

The steps to prepare a CentOS guest for installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions are outlined here, but since it references a few other pre-req steps, here’s a list of all the steps I took to get all the dependencies installed before you can install the Guest Additions:

Install yum-priorities (http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities):

yum install yum-priorities

Install RPMForge (http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge):

 

wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm

rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt

rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.*.rpm

Install dkms:

yum --enablerepo rpmforge install dkms

Install dev tools and kernel development:

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
yum install kernel-devel

 

 

 

 

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Fedora 18 & 19 – terrible performance on Virtual Box

I’m not sure what the deal is with Fedora 18 & 19 but the performance running under Virtual Box in Windows, regardless of how much memory you throw at the VM, really is unbearably slow. I had 18 installed for a while but haven’t used it for several months. I just fired it up again and it’s unusable. Downloaded 19 and started the install and it took a couple of hours. I might have something else going on on my laptop that slowing down the performance, but as it is it’s unusable.

I was looking for a RHEL derivative other than Oracle Linux since I wasn’t prepared wait to download the massive disk images which are several GB (really?!). I just realized though that CentOS is RHEL compatible. Very cool. Will download and see if it’s more usable under Virtual Box.

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Is it worth running Windows just to use Ham Radio Deluxe?

I spent some time over the weekend using Ham Radio Deluxe running on an HP Mini netbook, and came to the conclusion that the netbook doesn’t really have enough horsepower to give a good experience with HRD. It’s just too sluggish opening the apps and moving back and forward between the Log app and the DM780 digital modes app. I did enjoy having the ability to automatically log my QSOs though, so I’ve spent some more time to investigate how I can make better use of the apps I’ve been using up until now on my Mac.

Turns out that RUMLog will watch the log files from FLDIGI and automatically copy new logged QSOs across from FLDIGI, so this is a good step in the right direction. For JT65-OSX, although it’s not automated, it will write to an ADIF file and then you can import that into RUMLog manually, so that’s better than nothing.

Sorry HRD, you’re just too bloated and I’m not interested in buying a new Windows machine just to run you. For now I think I’m going back to the apps I was already using on my Mac. Turns out RUMLog is actually pretty good 🙂

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