During an Application Compatibility webcast I attended recently the presenter mentioned the Fiddler Tool. There are many network traffic monitoring Tools out there, but if you are just after capturing HTTP traffic, this one should get your attention.

Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data

Fiddler is FREE and can be downloaded from here and some demonstration videos here

Within our daily life in IT we often find interesting sources of information on the internet or on our company intranet. So after a while, most of us typically end up having a large number of Bookmarks. In my case these are 1168 items.

Yesterday I cam across this nice FREE tool called AM-Deadlnk. With AM-Deadlnk you can check your bookmarks and find out if these are still valid. The utility is smart enough to tell you whether the link is completely dead or if the page has been redirected.

Beside checking the status of Bookmarks AM-Deadlink can find duplicates, download FavIcons and backup your Bookmarks into a ZIP file. Support is provided for Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox and Opera.

Click here to download AM-DeadLink

As a response to the European Antitrust Commission, Microsoft will strip the Internet Explorer from Windows7 SKUs aimed for European markets. For end users this means that unless the hardware vendor has a browser pre-installed, which is going to be very unlikely, users must install a browser themselves.

So how to download and install a browser if you don’t have a browser to access the internet? The geeks among us would probably use an ftp command and download the browser binaries from some ftp server hosting the browser installation sources. But for regular users, the only options available are to download the browser installation sources upfront on another system that has a browser with internet access and store the installation sources on a USB drive or order the installation media at Microsoft. For access to Internet Explorer 8 click here

….. but there is another solution, that is actually quite simple and provides you access to the browser download pages without having a browser installed yet. just follow the instructions described below:

1) Create a new text file on the desktop called browser.hta

2) Edit it with Notepad

3) Add this line:
<iframe src=”http://www.google.com/” width=”100%” height=”100%” />

4) Save the file, close Notepad

5) Double-click anything.hta and go get your browser of choice

Credits for this solution go to my friend Claude Henchoz

On March 13. 1989 Tim Berners-Lee provided the foundation of the world wide web. Read more about 20 years of web @ the CERN 20 Years WWW anniversary site or watch the 20 Years WWW video.