Last night, I tried to get the wireless card working on the Omnibook. However, while I copied the appropriate configuration file info, I neglected to write down the file name. (Idiot!) Still, I gave it a decent shot to no avail.

One thing that I did realize is that I never backed up yet another Linux box to my Mvix drive. This box is hard-wired into the network and will be phased out. It’s a dual processor 750Mhz PIII machine with two SCSI disks. For what it offers, it sucks up a lot of power. I used to keep it up and running as a home server, but a lower power box with energy saving capabilities would be a better server box. Instead, I’m going to keep it around and use it as a SMP/OS experimentation rig. Maybe. As if I have all the free time in the world.

So, in case you had forgotten, I have a Ruby script called netget that can use HTTP connections to walk a directory tree, provided that the directories in question do not have index.htm files and that the directory permissions allow indexing. The server box did not have a web server on it, it was a file server, not a web server, so I figured that I’d just code up the simple Ruby webserver like I did for the Linux laptop. I typed in ‘ruby’ and got ‘ruby: command not found’. Oh, the horror!

Not really. I simply got on my WinXP box and found a Ruby repository. Going back to the Linux box, I wget’d the tarball, extracted it, built the ruby system and installed it. No muss, no fuss. After refreshing the necessary code from the Programming Ruby book, I fired up the web server and used my netget script to download the archive directory of projects, photos, scripts, the whole enchilada. It took quite a while, particularly all the digital photos.

So, now I have all my files on the Mvix drive. There are a lot of duplicates. My next scripting project will involve writing a utility that will walk through the folder tree, recording the filenames and their sizes and looking for duplicates. The utility will reports three levels of similarity: same name, same size, byte equality. I need to be careful, b/c my wife and I both have Sony digital cameras and the filenames are simply counters. Therefore, there could be two unique photos labelled with the same filename. Hell, they might even be the same size.

So, my goal will be to trim the true duplicates and reorganize the folder tree.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 10:24 am and is filed under Hackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.