Hello Monks,

A handful of free services on the Net are offering free "online hard drives" (I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to check out the specifics of the offers each entity makes). To make a short list, there is:

As a user I find a lot to be annoyed about concerning all these sites -- but they are free, after all, so complaining about their buggy systems is pretty pointless. However as a coder I am not satisfied to leave it alone; I cannot help but wonder if there isn't a challenge to be met there. If their coders cannot get their sites to work, maybe I can overcome the obstainancy of their systems with some judiciously applied Perl?

Just for reference, because some readers may wonder what I mean by "buggy", I'll observe that file uploads often fail. It may be that some of these services (I have accounts with them all <sigh> ..) have file size limits that I forget in between each time I need to upload (and I'd like to arrange for someone reliable, like Perl, to remember that kind of thing for me ... wouldn't this be true laziness ?) Also the desktop client software for Win32 that can be downloaded for most of the services is not working on WinNT (even though it is supposed to -- a situation that many NT users must find quite tiresomely familiar; it is an industry-wide problem with mass-marketed commercial software).

My meditation concerns this: an invitation to

  1. Let us know if anyone knows of existing Perl hacks into these systems, so that uploading or downloading of files from the remote storage server can be programmatically controlled;
  2. Let us know if anyone has been thinking about this, but hasn't written any working code yet;
  3. Let us (me specifically) know if the idea interests any fellow monks and they would like to collaborate on a project.

For my part I have little detailed knowledge of how these systems work, and don't want to assume without knowing more than I do, and I think that hacking this all by myself is a bit beyond my abilities at present. However I recently came across a clue that suggested to me that xdrive, for instance, is simply using a variety of FTP transaction (as might well all of them be) to upload to the remote server.

My guess is that this would be true "hacking" as the clueless mass media knows it, involving the running of a packet sniffer on one's system to monitor and suss out what is taking place between one's desktop / laptop box and the remote server, and then seeking to construct a workable emulation of that in Perl, adding all sorts of error-checking, redundancy and try-again-until-it-uploads obstinancy of course. I have never used a packet sniffer. A sockets guru might find this a worthy game?

I would welcome any replies, insights, or expressions of interest.


    soren

In reply to A little project - Web storage by Intrepid

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