proxomitron - quangnitron

Maybe some of you already know, I have a stupid firewall at work that caches every single page, even when the page tells it not to do so.

This thing caused me a serious problem, especially when taking Java BlackBelt exams. I needed to reload the page all the time to get a fresh copy of the question.

What even worse is that when the page redirects to another page, mostly error page, refreshing won't work. I had to add dummy parameters to the URL using the LiveHTTPHeaders Firefox extension. This is quite a tedious job.

Well, a proxy that generates random parameters will solve the problem. I decided to start work on my quangnitron project again, however it is not an easy task.

Another idea crossed my mind today. Remember, even when the cache is still there, refreshing the browser will still get you the fresh version of the page? Why is this? A little analysis on the requests sent by the browser brought me to the long-waited result. Yes! It's the Cache-Control: max-age=0 header that does the job :) Fortunately the stupid firewall still respects this :)

No of course I wouldn't have to manually add this header to the request every time using LiveHTTPHeaders. Because it can be done nicely using Proxomitron. Now with Proxomitron it's freedom here :D

Oh and since Proxomitron's author, Scott Lemmon, passed away a few years ago, I think I should continue working on my quangnitron project to create a cross-platform version of this wonderful tool. With more features added in the future of course :)

Well, maybe I've been saying too much :P Making quangnitron as good as Proxomitron is a little too big for a lazy monkey like me. Anyone wanna teamwork? :D