I like to know what my computer is doing.

It's been annoying me a bit of late that I can't always easily tell what my web browser is actually doing when I visit a page, I want to be able to see what it's fetching from where. As web sites get more complicated and things like AJAX become more common, understanding how a web page works (and breaks) is becoming much, much harder.

The simplest way I know to regain control, is to use a properly configured proxy server. With that in mind, I installed Squid on my laptop.

sudo port install squid almost worked...

Tonight I debugged what had gone wrong (bad config and wrong permissions on Squid's cache directory) and configured Firefox to talk to the shiny new local Squid. Then I turned off the privacy features of Squid and turned the logging way up... and hooray! Now I have a very detailed record of exactly what my web browser is downloading off the Interweb, when, why and how.

One thing this is useful for, is grabbing mp3 files I like from behind the facade of naive flash players that lack friendly "save this song" buttons. I do kind of need to hack Squid to ignore the HTTP no-store directive if I want complete control; Myspace audio streams are still just barely out of my reach. Maybe later.

Finally I decided to have some more fun and wrote my own version of the classic upside-down-ternet redirector. So now I can browse the internet with images flipped or blurred! Woo! Not terribly useful, but quite amusing.

It'll be even more amusing when I figure out how to configure OS X to function as a transparent proxy and put together a portable upside-down-ternet access point kit...

I can totally see a kit like that making airports waits much less boring.