Software updates

Development on any of my free software has kind of stalled recently. I have had the power supply in my desktop and the IDE controller in my laptop die within a week of each other, leaving me temporarily stranded without any way to code. I am up and running again with a new desktop machine, an auctioned ex-government Dell I bought cheaply from a friend. With a 1.4 GHz P4 it is substantially beefier than my old 800 MHz Celeron, although it's not really the kind of thing I notice in my daily usage.

Anyway, I am hoping to have some new code up for download soon. Work on Comanche has taken back seat to work on a tool I have called HTTPeek. HTTPeek is a Python program with a Tkinter GUI for hand crafting HTTP requests, throwing them at servers and then taking apart the response. I wrote it because I am starting to implement features of HTTP in Comanche that are not easy to test with a standard browser - things like time and range related header fields. I am quite happy with it because it feels like a genuinely useful tool. You can probably expect an "everything works but the code is ugly" release within a week, and an "everything works and I'm not ashamed anymore" release a week after that. Once HTTPeek is out, I will probably focus my attention back on Comanche. I have noticed a major error arising from my early misunderstanding of the HTTP specs, which will have to be fixed before any requests with an entity (e.g. POST requests) will be able to work.

I learned about port knocking yesterday and have been thinking of trying to implement some of the ideas (in Python, naturally) myself. This may be the focus of an upcoming project.