Monday, February 14, 2005 - Mon, 14 Feb 2005

My goal is to automate the purchasing as much as possible. I next needed to build a license key generator that Plimus could access so that the license key could automatically be supplied in an e-mail after the purchase. I already had the generator, so that part was easy. But making it available through a custom HTTP request was a bit tougher.

My web page counter program I wrote a long time ago was a very simple sort of program that I used as a model to send the result out, but I couldn’t figure out how to accept the parameters for input. After a few e-mail exchanges with Plimus support, I eventually searched the web and found this Dr. Bob article on Delphi CGI. It was just what I needed. It’s no wonder why I couldn’t figure it out myself, because the rules for parsing input from the two different types of HTML requests (POST and GET) are not trivial. Special characters are encoded and … well I won’t go into the gross details. If you’re interested, you can read Dr. Bob’s article with the above link. It took longer than I hoped, but I did get that working.

While I was doing that, I decided to finally bite the bullet and upgrade my daughter’s computer to Service Pack 2 of Windows XP. I had read enough horror stories about SP2’s early release, but by now I figured it has stabilized enough, and she wanted Version 2 of MovieMaker to work with. Running back and forth between computers, I was able to get both my Behold work done and her install done without wasting any time waiting for each XP install step. Ultimately the only glitch was having the wireless networking software on her machine competing with Windows XP for the wireless control. I ended up disabling the software (removing it from the startup directory) and allowing XP to control the wireless. That seemed to get it all working well, even with the new XP firewall. I also downloaded Beta Spyware software and it cleaned off another 20 or so things that AdAware didn’t catch.