CAIB vol. 2-6

I whipped up an UNIX shell script (to download all the CAIB vol. 2 through
6 PDF files) in a few minutes -- none of this 50 point-n-click junk for me!

If you've got an UNIX system and want to fetch the CAIB pdf files over your
internet connection, you can use this script. Read before using because it
requires a number of additional utilities (grep, awk, etc) to be already
present on your system. (Most modern setups should have them all.)

You can get the script from:

ftp://ftp.globalcrossing.net/pub/users/dsf/grab-caib.sh

If you'd rather just grab the zip files of each CAIB volume with all of the
volume's PDF files in the zip file, then you can grab it from:

ftp://ftp.globalcrossing.net/pub/users/dsf/caibvol2.zip
ftp://ftp.globalcrossing.net/pub/users/dsf/caibvol3.zip
ftp://ftp.globalcrossing.net/pub/users/dsf/caibvol4.zip
ftp://ftp.globalcrossing.net/pub/users/dsf/caibvol5.zip
ftp://ftp.globalcrossing.net/pub/users/dsf/caibvol6.zip

(The above stuff are on a fast internet connection -- not an home server,
so have a go at it.)

The size of each zip file:

Vol. 2 = 50 MB
Vol. 3 = 39 MB
Vol. 4 = 49 MB
Vol. 5 = 181 MB
Vol. 6 = 4.3 MB

When fully uncompressed on your hard drive, will be a total of 374 MB for
all six volumes' PDF files (not including the zip files themselves). Better
be a fast internet connection (DSL, broadband) or a *lot* of time and
patience!

Only note: you'll have to manually fetch these two additional cover PDF
files for Volume 5 if you really want to print it out (not included in
my Vol. 5 zip file):

http://www.caib.us/news/report/pdf/vol5/book2/cover.pdf
http://www.caib.us/news/report/pdf/vol5/book3/cover.pdf

You can use WinZIP, PKUNZIP, Stuffit Expander, VMS UNZIP, or a number of
other tools dealing with ZIP files under Windows, OS/2, MacOS, VMS, Unix,
and many other platforms.

-Dan

Dan Foster wrote:

(The above stuff are on a fast internet connection -- not an home server,
so have a go at it.)

As Dan slashdots his own server....

D.
--
The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found
at the following URLs:

Text-Only Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq.html

Enhanced HTML Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html

Corrections, comments, and additions should be
e-mailed to , as well as posted to
sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for
discussion.

In article ,
Dan Foster wrote:

I whipped up an UNIX shell script (to download all the CAIB vol. 2 through
6 PDF files) in a few minutes -- none of this 50 point-n-click junk for me!

(snip!)

Well, damnation! Where were you and your super-duper-scripti-ness last
month when I needed you? ;-)

Alas, it never occured to me to script it; I've been thoroughly seduced
by the oooey-gooey-GUI-goodness that is Mac OS X. Yes, I've got a
lovely transparent terminal window open as I type this post but all I've
used it for during the past couple of days is to check my uptime (up 15
days, 3:13, 3 users, load averages: 0.91, 0.56, 0.45 as of right now .
.. .)

--
Herb Schaltegger, B.S., J.D.
Reformed Aerospace Engineer
Columbia Loss FAQ:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html

In article , Herb Schaltegger wrote:

Well, damnation! Where were you and your super-duper-scripti-ness last
month when I needed you? ;-)

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

Alas, it never occured to me to script it; I've been thoroughly seduced
by the oooey-gooey-GUI-goodness that is Mac OS X. Yes, I've got a
lovely transparent terminal window open as I type this post but all I've
used it for during the past couple of days is to check my uptime (up 15
days, 3:13, 3 users, load averages: 0.91, 0.56, 0.45 as of right now .

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

Dan Foster wrote:

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!)

Even more annoying is the incorporation of sub team reports in that
damm 4-pages-in-one format.

D.
--
The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found
at the following URLs:

Text-Only Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq.html

Enhanced HTML Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html

Corrections, comments, and additions should be
e-mailed to , as well as posted to
sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for
discussion.

In article ,
Dan Foster wrote:

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)

Ah, you're right, no wget. But I've got fink installed. So:

%fink install wget

give fink my admin password, wait 17 seconds while it downloads the
source and about two minutes more to compile and install (hey, it's only
an 800 mhz GS iBook!) and I'm there. No need to modify the scripts on
MY account now.

Thanks, though. I'm sure a lot of folks can use your efforts. :-)

--
Herb Schaltegger, B.S., J.D.
Reformed Aerospace Engineer
Columbia Loss FAQ:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html

"Dan Foster" wrote in message
...
I whipped up an UNIX shell script (to download all the CAIB vol. 2 through
6 PDF files) in a few minutes -- none of this 50 point-n-click junk for
me!

If you've got an UNIX system and want to fetch the CAIB pdf files over
your
internet connection, you can use this script. Read before using because it
requires a number of additional utilities (grep, awk, etc) to be already
present on your system. (Most modern setups should have them all.)


[snip]

Bless you! I was finally working up the intestinal fortitude to start the
download prod-cess.

Is there similar scripting capability for Windows?

David Stribling
Remove the to reply

In article , David Stribling wrote:
Bless you! I was finally working up the intestinal fortitude to start the
download prod-cess.



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.

Is there similar scripting capability for Windows?

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

In article , Derek Lyons wrote:
Dan Foster wrote:

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!)

Even more annoying is the incorporation of sub team reports in that
damm 4-pages-in-one format.

Yeah, soon noticed that. I have a large monitor... but couldn't quite read
the text. Became readable only at 400%, so I printed a single page just to
see how readable it was on paper.

The results were rather disappointing -- I literally needed a magnifying
glass (or perhaps a scanning electron microscope, heh) to read it. Doctors'
"prescription scribble" is more clear, heh.

Much of the cause was likely due to the four-pages-in-one format; there
were also other secondary effects such as some fuzziness due to it not
being a first-generation copy. At least some of the documents looked like
it may have been scanned in.

The work looked like it was originally composed in electronic format; I
wondered why they couldn't have had made it available as a separate
read-only file in addition to inclusion in the report... or why they didn't
just stick with one page of document per actual page. Who knows... the IT
people supporting the CAIB's efforts generally did well, but darn it, these
two issues (split up volume files and 4-in-1 pages) put a stain on their
hard work, IMO.

-Dan

Thanks! I grabbed your zip files, and have already extracted them and made
a CD including vol 1 and a couple other pdfs they posted earlier (the impact
velocity and a timeline). All nice and tidy, now just need time to read all
of it!!

Thanks for the info on win scripting. I found an FTP get command in VB--I
didn't think dos batch file commands had any file retrival capability, just
checking in case ;^)

David

"Dan Foster" wrote in message
...

[snip]
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.

[snip]
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