I Am Chris - A Peek at Virb 2's HTTP Headers

February 20, 2009

A Peek at Virb 2's HTTP Headers

I’ve been on an explorative kick this week, which while somewhat derailing to my work, has been enjoyable in a highly nerdy way. Virb 2 was just launched a day or 2 ago (hats off to the Virb guys), and I’m trying to not dismiss it altogether as tumblr has currently captured my attention. Anyway, I’m not into product comparisons so on with the nerdy.

Out of plain technological curiosity, I wanted to have a look at the HTTP headers Virb responds with. So I scraped my public profile page using curl, dumping the headers for inspection and sending the output into oblivion (aka /dev/null):

curl http://virb.com/chrislewis -D h.txt > /dev/null

Let’s have a look shall we?

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Virb loves you <3
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 20:30:50 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Set-Cookie: BSGISAWESOME=(long and boring)
Expires: Fri, 25 Oct 1985 08:20:00 GMT
Cache-Control: (long and boring)
Pragma: no-cache
X-Access-Code: 4 8 15 16 23 42
X-Manhattan: I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.

So they hid the server name, either out of protectionism, security concerns, goofyism, or a combination. My vote is a combination of 1 and 3.

Then there’s a cookie - probably the session cookie - named BSGISAWESOME. I’m guessing that it’s based on Brad Smith’s name, the self-proclaimed “captain” of Virb.

X-Access-Code is a non-standard header I’ve not seen before, but its value however, is pretty clear: it is the LOST number sequence (and according to his Virb profile, Brad’s a fan).

X-Manhattan is also a non-standard, and most definitely a reference to the Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan. I’m under the impression that Brad lives in Manhattan, so that’s probably all there is to that one.

And I’m spent.