I am currently developing a Proxy app that visualizes requests and gives you the ability to plug-and-play like filter and modify requests, which makes it a quite powerful tool for debugging web applications, mobile apps and so on.

Of course, this tool is built using Cocoa and Core Foundation. Interesting enough, Core Foundation brings a Type called “CFHTTPMessage”, which handles a lot of low-level message parsing and processing, and is really handy and quite easy to use.

There is one drawback: CFHTTPMessage is not designed to handle both the order in which the headers arrived in a message and duplicate header fields. The first point is somewhat irrelevant, as the HTTP1.1 standard points out that servers are not supposed to depend on any order in the clients – it’s really only a minor issue. The latter point is complicated. HTTP relies on duplicate headers a lot, consider this HTTP request ( Real life!! )


POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.1
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1
Accept-Charset: utf-8;q=0.7
Accept-Charset: *;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Origin: http://momo.brauchtman.net
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_0) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.112 Safari/535.1
Cookie: word
Cookie: wordpress_xxxxxxxx
Cookie: wordpress_logged_in_xxxxxx; httponly; expires=Tue
Referer: http://momo.brauchtman.net/wp-admin/post-new.php
Host: momo.brauchtman.net
Accept-Language: de-DE
Accept-Language: de;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US;q=0.6
Accept-Language: en;q=0.4
Accept: */*
Content-Length: 1160


There are quite some duplicates here. So the clever guys at Cupertino just forgot to handle duplicate headers at all? No, not really. But they just didn’t document what they are doing with it, which isn’t that clever at all, but fortunately, the sources are available here. So after a bit of digging, I found out that duplicates are simply appended to a former header with same key, which sucks – the delimiter used is a simple comma, which is quite regularly found in header values, which makes splitting an art for itself.

First there is Microsoft’s ever green cash-cow, the Office Suite, selling in Germany for about 250€. This suite includes nothing that is not available for free in the OpenOffice Suite, compatibility is mostly ensured. Even worse, this Office suite fails to provide state-of-the-art functionality like wrapping text around the contour of an image. Instead of pushing this product to become even better, Microsoft seems to be happy to sell it. No need to improve it.

Same on the Operating Systems. Instead of inventing something new, useful, Microsoft seems to have decided that this is just not necessary. The eye-candy provided in Vista fails to provide some real usage advantage, and is therefore unnecessary. And while Mac OS is sold in one edition for 100€, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions are free, Vista is being sold in several stunningly expensive editions.

But Microsoft isn’t sleeping! They just lately presented the amazing new killer-app called Songsmith and the new Taskbar for Windows 7. The first one negates any use besides fun, the second doesn’t seem to be a revolution. Nothing break-through, as always, years behind.

Welcome to the browser’s section. While Firefox 3, Safari and Opera work mostly standards compliant and are kept up-to-date, Internet Explorer 7 is far away from rendering anything the way it should be rendered, and is also far from being up-to-date in any way. It seems Microsoft is just waiting here for innovations seen in other Browsers customers like and then implements them. Not what I expect from a global player.

Last but not least, it’s Microsoft communication pissing me off. Instead of presenting cool features or other breakthroughs, all the CEOs spitting out is related to Microsofts market position.

But with an attitude like this, it seems in question how long Microsoft is going to keep that. Office and some vintage Operating System won’t keep the value up. What is your opinion on Microsofts products?