I mentioned Privoxy earlier when talking about Google Chrome. As the homepage will attest, this is a very “bare bones” software package. However, proxy servers really don’t need many fancy features to be very useful, and all the real action with the program takes place in text files. Setup is a breeze as there really is little to configure during the installation. Once running, you can adjust your proxy settings in your browser of choice to use port 8118 (if you kept the default) on the “localhost” if you have set it up on the same machine.

Yesterday I mentioned that we needed to put videos online for an indeterminate sized audience. These videos were in AVI Format, which is a pretty typical format to receive video in. Putting videos on the web can be done numerous ways, including using various hosting services. However, we needed the quality to remain high (higher than most hosting services permit) and we wanted good tracking of the distribution (to determine if the project was successful).

I'm working on a project that requires distributing videos to an indeterminate size audience. We have a pretty robust server in place for the project, but media files are by far larger than the web pages that reference them. To avoid creating a denial of service attack on ourselves if the file becomes popular, we decided to host the videos using Amazon's S3 cloud file service. This required creating S3 buckets and files... so out comes CloudBerry Explorer.

Microsoft Vista Ultimate was the "fanboy" version which included both the business features *and* the media features in one package. There were also promised "Ultimate Extras" which for the most part turned out to be underwhelming, but really shouldn't have been a primary reason for buying Ulimate anyway. Now that Windows 7 is out and promises to bring the experience that Vista should have been to customers, Microsoft it trying to crank up sales with a... sale:

http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft/Windows-Windows-7/category/102

I ran into an issue with users who couldn't connect to a government website; the site reported "You must use Internet Explorer 5.5 or greater". This was odd, as the entire group affected was using IE7. (UPDATE: This problem continues with IE8 as well.)

At first I thought it was just a bad browser detection, but when I visited the site, there was no error message. A bit of searching on the Internet turned up the fact that machines that upgraded from IE 6 can retain part of the connection string in a registry key: