File contents hex dump at poditronic.com
July 25th, 2009 | by Sean |
Hex dump of image file
Just added a hex dump page at poditronic.com – very similar code to the “View Server HTTP headers” page, but could be useful to some. The page currently loads just the first 512 bytes of the content at some URL, and present the bytes in a table. Printable bytes are displayed as-is, non-printable are displayed as a hex byte. I wrote the page because I wanted to explain to someone what meta-data is stored with an image. A web page is a big improvement in accessibility over asking someone to open a terminal and type in commands!
I had to remove the Referer field because one server we wanted to look at images on was returning 404 Not Found. I imagine this is a form of hotlinking protection. Sending a request to the server without the Referer field resulted in the image being returned as expected. An obvious future enhancement would be to provide a toggle for Referer field, and perhaps also an option to change the number of bytes to display.
It’s interesting to see what metadata is left in images on the web – happy fishing!