January 26, 2003

I don’t know what happened (I haven’t been online today yet to find out if there is any news) but a major portion of the Net seemed to go down yesterday around noon and still had not come back into operation by about 9 o’clock at night. I say “seemed” because I personally know of only three servers – mine, a friend’s and an IRC server I was on at the time this happened. Yahoo was fine as was Google but I don’t know if there were any other sites affected but I saw a whole heap of activity on my IM buddy list soon after that since people seemed to keep on appearing and disappearing. So I guess there must have been other problems elsewhere too. To me it seemed as if a major portion of the Net in the US (at least in a large area) went down but I don’t know for sure but things seem to be back to normal now and that’s what matters.

I did complete the work on the image spider program yesterday. I decided to take the easy way out for the moment and simply convert the text encoded ampersands back to ampersands and that did the trick. However, I then ran into another problem. I was basically accessing the IHTMLDocument2 interface of the web browser component and using it’s execCommand method to send a SaveAs command. Now the SaveAs command is supposed not to display the save file dialog if you pass it a destination file name but try as I might, I could not get that to work – it would always display the save file dialog no matter what. So while the image spider will save like 40 images off links on a page, you have to click OK 40 times to do it. While I don’t mind it so much – it can get to be pretty annoying after a while. So now I’m thinking of different methods to do the same thing. One method would be to make use of the DownloadManager interface of the web browser component and simply start multiple downloads – if that method does not pop up the Save dialog. The other method would be to simply download the images using a different component altogether – one that I can control better … like the Indy HTTP component. Each approach has problems – I don’t know if the DownloadManager interface is supported in Delphi (I’ve run into unsupported interface problems before …) and I don’t know if a site which maintains your logged in status would still see you as logged in if you used an external component like Indy instead of the web browser that you used to log in, to do the download. I guess I’ll have to try either or both methods to see if they actually work. I think I’ll give the DownloadManager method a try first though since that does not involve any new components …

Tags:
Posted by Fahim at 6:23 am  |  2 Comments