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14th July 2001 |
OLD TECHNOLOGY TO THE RESCUE |
Brian Grainger |
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HOW IT IS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN You want a 3.5 MB patch for Microsoft Word to stop it executing ill-formed macros without warning. This is to plug yet another security problem with MS products. You turn on your broadband Internet connection and have the patch in a minute or two. WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS You want a 3.5 MB patch for Microsoft Word. You live in the UK, a place that is number 1 for e-commerce according to our prime minister. You do not have broadband because BT have been dragging their heels providing it and the regulator has been bl***y useless in encouraging them to do so. You turn on your 56K modem and connect to the Internet using Freeserve. Despite your connection NOT having unlimited access and you pay local call rates you know from experience that Freeserve will disconnect, (even during a download), if you do not talk to its server about every 8 minutes. You combat this by going to a new web page every 5 minutes during the download. The connection is slow tonight, (getting close to the end of the weekend cheap rate), so after about 15 minutes you still only have 2 MB of the download. You go to www.redhat.com. It takes forever to display anything and when it does Freeserve has disconnected. You tear your hair out. You have wasted 20 minutes, you have paid for a telephone call and you still have no download. OLD TECHNOLOGY COMES TO THE RESCUE The next day you start thinking. You work for a company that has broadband access and allows its employees to surf the net, provided it is in your own time when not business related. Fortunately, the Microsoft site is not restricted by the firewall. Also, your work PC has a floppy disk so that you can use it to transfer files to your home PC. A plan of action forms. You download your MS Word patch at work. You do this and wait a minute or two while it downloads. The joy of broadband! The only problem now is how to transfer a 3.5 MB file to your home PC. It is no good e-mailing it since that is almost as long as a 3.5 MB download. No, the answer is to use that ancient technology the floppy disk. There is a slight problem of course. A floppy disk will only hold 1.4 MB, which means the file is going to have to cover 3 disks. By default, Windows expects complete files to be on a single floppy if you are going to use the copy command. One possible solution is to zip up the file. However, if the file is still bigger than 1.4 MB the problem is still not solved and this 3.5 MB file is already compressed. It is time for the thinking cap again. Us old timers have the edge with this sort of problem. We remember that behind Windows there is a useful operating system called MSDOS. It allows us to do what WE want, rather than guess what we want to do and get it wrong. Programs written for it are also incredibly compact and over the years I have collected a whole stack of them which I have never thrown away. I know in my pile of programs is a very handy program called Slice. This program was among 50 hot utilities that were distributed by PC Magazine in 1992. The program itself, written in 1989, is a huge 2K in size, smaller than the blank template I use for these web pages! I have mentioned Slice before in the days of the ICPUG paper newsletter, but even now it is still useful. What Slice does is to slice a large file into however many smaller files it takes and copies the result to floppies. Everything is transparent to the user. You simply tell Slice the name of the file to slice and the drive reference of the floppy: e.g. slice c:\workarea\bigfile.exe a: Having given the command, Slice will prompt you to insert blank floppies when required. Make a note of the order the floppies are created because you have to put them back in the same order when the original file is recreated. It took about five minutes to create the 3 floppies for my 3.5 MB download. The floppies can now be taken to the PC where you really want the file. Within the huge 2K Slice program is another program called Splice. When the floppies are created this program will be put on the first floppy of the set. This time you tell Splice the drive reference of the floppy drive and then the pathname where the recovered file is to be placed. e.g. splice a: c:\workarea The file will now be created in the given directory with the original file name. It is a little quicker than creating the file in the first place so I got my original file back from my floppies in about 3 minutes. THE RESULT Download: 2 minutes Total time: 10 minutes, no phone charges, hair still in place and a perfect download. Thank goodness for old technology! If you have a use for Slice just click on the link and download it. Rene Aubron of Colombes, France writes to say: I owe you a lot, (of hours mainly), and can share with you another case where SLICE is a miracle. I have two PCs, both in W98. One crashed and will not restart except in MSDOS. Your suggestion about SLICE enabled me to save on floppies and restore under W98 all files over 1.44MB. Again Thanks |
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