February 11th, 2007:

Over the years, I have ripped a bunch of cds to mp3. I wanted to take them to work so I could listen there, but my work pc does not have a dvd drive, and wasting cd’s for a few albums didn’t seem like the way to go. So…what to do?

Well, I decided to zip them up, dump them on my web space, and download from work. Considering the network is full of data that is actually important to the company during the work day, downloading during work hours was not prudent. Plus, bandwidth throttling at work caused a single album download to take over an hour.

Of course, the best idea would have been to use my thumb drive, but a) its only 256mb, and b) I can’t find the damn thing. So, I installed wget for windows* on my work pc, wrote a batch file for each file I wanted to download, and set them to run as scheduled tasks starting at 3am. (If I had a linux box at work, I could have just made a cron job and been done with it.) Now, I am no longer concerned with slow download speeds or clogging the network and impeding the transport of important data.

*Wget for windows is a port of a linux command by the same name. W(eb)get does just that: it gets any web accessible file from the command line, making it perfect for batching. It allows for http username/passwords, so you can password protect your directories and still schedule downloads to run whenever you want.