Daily Archives: October 19, 2006

internet, software development

Amazon S3 Delphi sample

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I’ve upated my Delphi sample for using Amazon S3; this time I’ve put the exe up for download so anyone can try it (if you have an S3 account).

If there is interest I might work this up into a more user-friendly utility; or perhaps someone would like to help with this.

It does many of the essentials: file upload and download, progress report with cancel option, create, delete and list buckets and items.

http://www.itwriting.com/s3.php

Tim

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blogging, internet, web authoring

Brief notes on IE7

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I upgraded to Internet Explorer 7.0 on three machines this morning. I have to say the experience was very smooth, though not especially quick. You have to pass a validation dialog as well as a new licence agreement, so I guess there are hassles if Microsoft decides your not on “Genuine Windows”; but plenty has already been said on that subject.

IE7 is long overdue and probably won’t wean many off Firefox, but it’s a decent upgrade, with tabbed browsing perhaps the number one feature; of course FireFox has had this since its first release. Even if you use Firefox, I’d still be inclined to upgrade to IE7 simply because it’s pretty much a system component. You may not use it for browsing; but embedded IE will likely still turn up in a few apps you use. Web developers will need it for testing if nothing else.

I’m particularly interested in the centralized RSS platform which comes as part of IE7. I’m a satisfied user of Omea Reader, which is superb and deserves more attention than it gets; but I really like the idea of a single feed store in the OS, so I thought I should try migrating to IE7. First question: can IE7 import an OPML feed list? It turns out that it can, but the feature exposes some silliness in Microsoft’s new browser.

You see, Microsoft has gone for a clean look with no menu by default, just a few icons and an address bar. Unfortunately, this means there is significant functionality hidden by default, and finding it is not particularly intuitive. In this case, you have to click the Tools drop-down and select Menu Bar, then choose File – Import and Export, then choose Import Feeds.

It worked, I’m glad to say, and now all my subscribed feeds are in IE7. However, now that I’ve realised the importance of the Menu Bar I don’t want to hide it again, so I’ve lost the clean look; in fact, it feels odd having the menu bar below the address bar and I wish I could put it at the top where it belongs.

Will I be able to live with IE7 as a feed reader, or go running back to Omea in a day or two’s time? I’ll let you know.

Finally, a note for any Borland developers reading this. If you use Borland Developer Studio, you need to update the registry to avoid access denied errors with ASP.NET. See Resolving Access Denied errors in the BDS ASP.NET designer with IE7 installed.

Update: A comment to this blog tells me that import and export is also accessible through the Add to favorites icon. So showing the menu bar is not essential after all; it’s just a bit obscure as I’d presumed that Add to favorites only does what its name implies.

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Songs that are just about perfect

I feel another list coming on. This is for songs that have a quality of completeness, such that it is hard to imagine how they could be improved.

  1. The Cranberries – Linger. Best in the studio version as Dolores O’Riordan can’t resist getting the audience to sing along in concert.
  2. Bob Dylan – Like a Rolling Stone. Perhaps the definitive Dylan song. I like it because he appears to be singing about someone else, yet you cannot shake off the suspicion that he is singing about himself.
  3. Patti Smith – Because the night. Some songs you only need to hear once; you know immediately it is for the ages.
  4. Robert Wyatt – Shipbuilding. A very sad song, sung in a very sad voice. A parallel to Because the Night in a way, because it was a song borrowed from another singer/songwriter.
  5. David Bowie – Heroes. A build-up song, that ends with Bowie screaming. Seems to capture something about hope in despair.
  6. Jimi Hendrix – All along the Watchtower. Another borrowed song, that so much caught the essence of the song that Dylan started singing it almost the same way. I love the non-ending: “Two riders were approaching, and the wind began to howl.” And then what?
  7. Joan Baez – Diamonds and Rust. Presumed to be about Dylan. “My poetry was lousy you said,” who else could it be? Wrecked by Joan in concert in later years, when she ends with “I’ll take the diamonds.”
  8. New Order – Blue Monday. A disappointing band that never lived up to its promise; yet came out with some superlative singles of which this is the best.
  9. Richard Thompson – 1952 Vincent Black Lightning. A song about death. 
  10. Stephen Sondheim – Send in the clowns. How do you write about perfection?