There are times when you work with SSL traffic. Your website might be protected with a certificate so that traffic between you and the client is secure. At times like this, being a developer is troublesome. Browser cache settings need to be analyzed by looking at the HTTP headers. Encoding / Content type may need to be analyzed to ensure that a particular page is displayed correctly. These things cannot be looked into if the traffic is secure. There are situations under which the environment is secure but you must still sniff the data. So how do you manage this ?
Tools like Charles (A debugging proxy) help you do this. Charles allows you to proxy to a secure connection over a protocol like HTTPS and still read the traffic. So how does it do this ? Lets have a look.
Your environment probably has a self signed certificate like the one issued below, using keytool.
Things got even better today when we got our second google wave account for the same user. mmm 
wait… a second google wave account ? Yep. Google wave is split into googlewave.com accounts for normal end users and the wavesandbox.com accounts for developers and geeks. It is interesting to note the differences.
Googlewave:
- Is a little less buggier. It has more features like read only waves that the sandbox is missing.
- Linked to your existing gmail and docs. All your existing contacts can be… contacted.
- Has this cool green box that opens up for active wave conversations.
- No debugging or anything technically related.
- Number of invites allowed are varied. If you requested for the account yourself, you get anywhere from 8 – 22 invites (from what I have heard so far).
Wave sandbox
- Pretty buggy and is a developer’s paradise.
There are times when you need to display wireframes of your application for internal discussions / presentations etc. Some online applications allow you to draw a wireframe in no time. Here are a few of them
Balsamiq mockups:
Creately:
Fore UI:
Hot gloo:
iplotz:
Pencil: Mozilla firefox plugin based
Axure:
Each application has its own style of doing the mockup. Some use an informal approach. Other advanced ones let you click and see the results then and there. There are other tools out there that also run on desktops and IDEs like eclipse, Netbeans etc if you are looking for an offline solution.
Apparently it might be able to. Google has launched a flu trend service that can be used to determine the trends behind a flu pandemic / seasonal flu.
The flu trends faq hints at being able to detect pandemic flu. The quote from the faq reads
How is Google Flu Trends useful for pandemic flu?
Google Flu Trends models are built based on historic flu surveillance data. When a new flu virus causes the same symptoms as seasonal flu, Google Flu Trends can detect if overall flu rates are significantly increasing. Some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu is happening, and are therefore good indicators of flu activity.
Google tries to understand search data and its related patterns and then determines if the search was related to a flu in any way. It then maps this search to geo data to find out how the flu spreads.