HTTP Monitor

You know what’s fun about writing an HTTP monitor? Testing it basically requires surfing the internet. (c’mon that’s got to be a major plus, right?)

You know what’s not as fun? Creating an infinite loop in your internet explorer plugin that causes your system to go completely erratic and unstable without completely crashing. I ended up with three task-managers one of which was completely erratic and not actually showing correct performance. Needless to say, reboot was quite necessary at that point.

I’m actually making quite a bit of progress. Earlier this week with Q.’s help I figured out why my faked headers weren’t showing up in Netbeans (apparently there was one more spot the feature had to be enabled for IE). And since then I’ve been working on getting real headers into Netbeans rather than fake ones, and that basically means writing code to parse strings in C++. Parsing strings in C++ is not fun, its not nearly as easy as in Java. And its a lot more difficult to do in a non-MFC project where you can’t use CString, it requires going back to the <string.h> library functions, except there’s a bunch of quirks like the function that would seem obvious to use doesn’t really do what you need so you have to do it a different way. But every time I get a new header to show up in Netbeans correctly its great fun, and for some reason IE doesn’t put all the headers in one place so I’ve been getting them added in little chunks and it just looks closer and closer to working properly, at least for the general case with no bad data or anything.