Monthly Archives: October 2007

Using an HTTP proxy (shown via netcat)

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Ever wonder how applications talk to HTTP proxies? It’s simple really (like the rest of HTTP) – there’s a simple HTTP request method called CONNECT. It’s easily illustrated with a quick session of netcat:

$ nc -v proxy.foobar.com 3128
proxy.foobar.com [10.xx.xx.xxx] 3128 (?) open : Operation now in progress
CONNECT marc-abramowitz.com:80 HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.0 200 Connection established

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: marc-abramowitz.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:02:34 GMT
.........

Nothing magical.

The above process can be done with a program, of course. The one I am most familiar with is called corkscrew. With it you can do things like:

$ corkscrew proxy.foobar.com 3128 marc-abramowitz.com 80
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: marc-abramowitz.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 19:03:29 GMT
...

The corkscrew program is very useful in particular with the ProxyCommand config directive in OpenSSH as discussed in my post on using SSH though an HTTP proxy.

30,000 FitPoints

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This will mean nothing to anyone, except to me and Nicole, but it seemed like something I should keep a record of somewhere.

Saturday’s trip to the gym was my 101st and I reached the milestone of 30,000 FitPoints and received a yellow T-shirt. Nicole got her T-shirt too, though she had reached 30,000 a couple of weeks ago (they had been out of T-shirts at the time and they happened to receive several boxes of T-shirts on Saturday).

30,000 FitPoints

30,000 FitPoints

Car break-in in our neighborhood

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We went our for a bike ride and noticed that just around the corner from us, where we pick up our mail, a car had been broken into.

Car broken into

And apparently there was another break-in that same night.

I’m glad that we’re able to fit both of our cars in our garage.

The neighborhood mailing list is now buzzing with ideas about starting a neighborhood watch, hiring a security firm, making it a gated community, installing video cameras, etc.

A humorous day in the neighborhood

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or at least on the neighborhood email list.

Take a look at this exchange (names deleted to protect the people whose names have been deleted) from a week ago:

Person A’s original post:

I am a resident of Alegro community. I have been hearing some animal
(PIG) making noises at night.
Last night some kind of animal (May be a Bear) scratched furious on the
walls of my downstairs bedroom. It was really scary experience.

Person B’s reply:

If I understood you right did you say a “bear” was scratching at your bedroom door? Or did they scratch the word “furious” confused.

How did the bear come in your house? Yes, I’ve heard bear noises as well, I always thought it was the boars that come around and eat all the lawn and grass?

This was just the beginning of a very long thread about animal control, but this was by far the best part.