Space Forum / Shuttle / November 2003

Probably too busy thinking about that great mongolian grill place in
Markham (northeast of Toronto) or BD's in Cleveland, at the time. ;)

MacOS X's a great OS -- I've got two G4 systems running it at home :) (I'm
also a Mac user since 1988, and a Mac admin since um, '90, including a
stint at a top three credit card bank for the graphics dept.) I've also
admin'd a lot of other OSes so there's nothing I hate except for Xenix and
SCO UNIX (long before SCO's current stupidity with Linux), both of which I
have administered. (Even broke open the 20+ year old shrink-wrapped Xenix
kit and all, on orders of management...)

I've been an UNIX admin also for the past decade or so, so scripting my way
out of tight spots is just second nature ;) Besides, my employers often
gets annoyed when we have all these expensive and powerful machines, and
we're doing so much manual work with them -- they grumble and say: "Darnit,
make the computers *work* for YOU, not the other way around!" They've got a
good point. So we script a lot to keep our small setup (260 servers --
small compared to what some other teams runs...) working smoothly.

It took me about two minutes to whip up and slightly refine that script,
and about five minutes to add the comments. ;) The script is really not
*that* elegant as they come... was just a quick but effective hack job that
worked rather well for all six volumes with a tiny but annoying issue about
the Vol. 5 cover forms for Book 2 and 3.

I'll be sure to jump as soon as another major report gets released in that
durned annoying broken-up format. (Well, I can see how it'd be a benefit,
but I really wish they'd at least also made a per-volume PDF file
available. It's a lot easier to read through in one sitting with an
unbroken train of thought than to switch files 30-40 times!)

The bright side? Even the full-res Vol 1, plus the Vol 2-6 PDF files, will
all fit on a single 650 MB CD -- Vol 1 (full res) + Vol 2-6 comes in at
just under 500 MB total, IIRC.

For MacOS X, the only change to that script is I'd probably have had
replaced 'wget' with 'curl -O' because Apple dropped almost all GNU tools
due to license and legal concerns. (wget was in one of the OS X preview
release betas but they replaced it with cURL for the first shipping
product, 10.0)

-Dan

Know what you mean. If you've got a Windows system and just want all the
PDF files (except for two cover forms -- needed only if printing it, for
Vol 5 book 2 and 3), you can fetch the ZIP files from the FTP site I
listed. (They contain the PDF files that the report comprises.)

You'd probably need WinZIP (www.winzip.com has a free eval version
available for download) or a similiar utility to extract the PDF files, and
Adobe Acrobat reader (www.adobe.com) to view them.

Sure, Windows has the DOS scripting commands available, but it doesn't do
certain functions such as retrieving files. For that, you'd need an
external utility -- I used wget in this case. There *are* Windows versions
of most utilities in my script, but they are non-standard (have to download
them from a web or FTP site) and can't be expected to be already installed
on the average PC running Windows.

A little work with Visual Basic could probably do most of it,
out-of-the-box, although might need some additional VB libraries, and I'm
not sure if the runtime and additional networking-related libraries is
distributed on all common Windows OS versions... or if it behaves the same
on all the common Windows versions.

Long story made short: it's possible, but requires a little more planning
and coding work by someone with greater familiarity of Windows scripting
and programming than I. :)

If you aren't familiar with Windows scripting, your alternative is to just
download the ZIP files and then extract the PDF files from them. No
scripting required. Rather point-n-click and easy. (I'd anticipated there
would be some Windows users interested, so that's why I made the ZIP files
available.)

-Dan