alexpgp | Plugging away, at 60 seconds per minute!

There's no use - and little interest - in rehashing the sleep cycle. Let's just say I didn't get much, so it should be a pretty interesting next few hours.

The battery on my eSlate has, I think, given up the ghost. The pack gets uncomfortably hot when the computer is plugged into the wall, and if I unplug the power supply, the battery has just enough power to keep the machine running for about two minutes. Literally, two minutes.

The good news is that the machine works (and is cool) if I use the external power supply and keep the battery out of the case.

I got to the MCC a couple of hours early today, in order to get some miscellaneous stuff out of the way. Unfortunately, I forget the eSlate's power supply at home, so I had to make do with what was available at my work station.

Unfortunately, about the only thing I could was something quite a way down on my to-do list. It involved writing a PHP script that would allow me to manage files in my Web server's 'upload' directory. (Earlier, I'd modified a PHP script I'd found in print to allow files to be uploaded from a computer to my server by using the computer's Web browser.)

The management script started out as a simple routine that just listed the files in the directory, and then I incrementally added the display of times last modified and last accessed, and the file size.

So far, all of that was pretty mechanical and not a tremendous technical challenge. My next step was to turn each file name into a hypertext link, so that I could fetch or download the file. This was also pretty straightforward.

Finally, I set a checkbox next to each file name that, when checked, would instruct the script to delete the file after clicking on a Submit button at the bottom of the page. This was probably the hardest item to cobble together, as I had to figure out how to examine the value returned by each checkbox to see whether the file needed to be deleted. Eventually, that problem was solved and it was all over except for the formatting.

The result is a heck of an improvement over opening an FTP application (or running FTP via a DOS window), logging in, etc. Instead, now I can open a Web page and see all the available files, download the ones I need and then delete the ones that are just deadwood.

'Tis a small victory, but mine own.

Today's day for the ISS crew promises to be about as slow as yesterday. According to the schedule, they'll be regenerating their air scrubbers and talking to family up to about lunch, which is when Mike T. and I will be relieved.

Cheers...