I'm working on a project for a client, and I need to see exactly what transpires between a web browser and a web server, since what I've written isn't exactly working correctly.
So towards that end, I've written a program that acts as a very simple web proxy server—all it does is pass the data on to a real web proxy server, but it also dumps everything to disk so I can examine the traffic (it's not enough to look at the pages, I need to see what else is going on in HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol)).
As a test, I went to Slashdot [1]. As expected, the program saved all the sessions, didn't crash and didn't leave any zombie processes [2]. And then going through the saved files when I found out that there's an Easter Egg [3] in the pages Slashdot [4] send out.
You normally can't see this, even if you view the source of the page, since the Easter Eggs aren't part of the page. They're in the header portion of the transfer (not to be confused with the <HEAD> section of an HTML (HyperText Markup Language) page—there is a difference). For instance, on the HTML pages (and it's only sent with pages that are text) on one page I found:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK > **Date:** Sat, 13 Jul 2002 10:08:51 GMT > **Server:** Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_perl/1.25 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a > **X-Powered-By:** Slash 2.003000 > **X-Fry:** That's it! You can only take my money for so long before you take it all and I say enough! > **Cache-Control:** no-cache > **Pragma:** no-cache > **Connection:** close > **Content-Type:** text/html > **Content-Encoding:** gzip > **Content-Length:** 10760 >
And on another one I found:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK > **Date:** Sun, 30 Jun 2002 02:11:36 GMT > **Server:** Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_perl/1.25 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a > **X-Powered-By:** Slash 2.003000 > **X-Bender:** OK, but I don't want anyone thinking we're robosexuals. > **Last-Modified:** Mon, 03 Dec 2001 17:55:42 GMT > **ETag:** "33673f-13e-3c0bbc9e" > **Accept-Ranges:** bytes > **Content-Length:** 318 > **Connection:** close > **Content-Type:** text/plain >
And yet another one:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK > **Date:** Sat, 13 Jul 2002 10:09:23 GMT > **Server:** Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_perl/1.25 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a > **X-Powered-By:** Slash 2.003000 > **X-Fry:** I'm never gonna get used to the thirty-first century. Caffeinated bacon? > **Cache-Control:** no-cache > **Pragma:** no-cache > **Connection:** close > **Content-Type:** text/html > **Content-Encoding:** gzip > **Content-Length:** 18303 >
It seems to be quotes from Futurama [5], but I can't be entirely sure, as I've never seen Futurama. But still, it's neat finding stuff like this buried in programs (or websites as the case may be).
[2] http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/zombie.html