ericlaw

Using HTTPS Properly

Disclaimer: I’m a big fan of Pandora. I’ve been a listener for a decade or more, and I started paying for an annual subscription even before there was any real incentive to do so, solely because I loved the service and wanted it to succeed. This post isn’t really about Pandora, per-se, but about commonContinue reading “Using HTTPS Properly”

On Daylight Savings Time

In Fiddler, the Caching tab will attempt to calculate the cache freshness lifetime for responses that lack an explicit Expires or Cache-Control: max-age directive. The standard suggests clients use (0.1 * (DateTime.Now – Last-Modified)) as a heuristic freshness lifetime. An alert Fiddler user noticed that the values he was seeing were slightly off what he expected: sometimes the valuesContinue reading “On Daylight Savings Time”

Out-of-Memory is (Usually) a Lie

The most common exception logged by Fiddler telemetry is OutOfMemoryException. Yesterday, a Facebook friend lamented: “How does firefox have out of memory errors so often while only taking up 1.2 of my 8 gigs of ram?” This morning, a Python script running on my machine as a part of the Chromium build process failed with aContinue reading “Out-of-Memory is (Usually) a Lie”

Things I’ve Learned in my first weeks on Chrome

This is a stub post which will be updated periodically. It would be impossible to summarize how much I’ve learned in the last six weeks working at Google, but it’s easy to throw together some references to the most interesting and accessible things I’ve learned. So that’s this post. Developing Chrome Searching the code isContinue reading “Things I’ve Learned in my first weeks on Chrome”

Web Developers and Footguns

If you offer web developers footguns, you’d better staff up your local trauma department. In a prior life, I wrote a lot about Same-Origin-Policy, including the basic DENY-READ principle that means that script running in the context of origin A.com cannot read content from B.com. When we built the (ill-fated) XDomainRequest object in IE8, weContinue reading “Web Developers and Footguns”