Antony’s blog

Thanks to Mike for pointing this out to me.

Ever wonder how those automatic proxy configuration URL’s work? Basically the URL must return javascript code served up with a Content-Type of “application/x-ns-proxy-autoconfig”, which the browser will run to decide whether to proxy each URL it fetches, and which proxy to use. The javascript should be returned as just plain text, not wrapped in <script> tag’s or anything.

The one function you need to implement is FindProxyForURL(url, host), which gets called for every URL the browser fetches, and must return a string containing one of “DIRECT”, “PROXY host:port”, or “SOCKS host:port”. Actually, the string can also contain a list of these separated by semi-colons, in which case the browser will try each one in sequence until it is able to fetch the page. There are some convenient functions predefined for you to help in examining to url and making proxy decisions based on domain, network of resolved ip server host ip address, time of day/week, etc.

The specification can be be found here.

It’s 2006 and in my ideal world I could do all my communication via phone, email, http(s), IM, RSS, etc. But every few months I need to send or receive a fax. We don’t have a home phone line; instead we just use our cellphones or skype for phone calls, so ideally I could do my faxing via the internet. For receiving faxes, I signed up for a free efax number a long time ago, and that seems to work ok. I don’t know if you can still get a free account with them or not, but the business model seems to be that they occasionally send you emails either trying to upsell you on their services, or with third party advertising.

For a while now I had been looking for a solution for sending faxes via the internet. Most services accept upload of common document types, and I have a scanner at home which I can use for any document I don’t have in electronic form. But the real problem was that both efax and all of the other companies I had found on the web seemed to be aimed at small/medium businesses, and charged a monthly fee to be able to send faxes. I just wanted a place I could pay one-time fees for very occasional use to save myself the trips to kinkos. Recently I found two companies offering this no-recurring fee fax sending service: greenfax.com and faxitnice.com. I picked faxitnice to try out because they were a little cheaper and I liked the look of their web site better. The user experience was great - very little text they forced me to read, nice visual cues where to click, etc. It took three simple steps: 1) create account, 2) use credit card to purchase $20 credit, and 3) send fax by typing a fax number and clicking on a button to upload a word document.

No more trips to kinkos for me!