HealthyIT

I stumbled across a python script woof, or Web Offer One File, the other day in the typical serendipity of the web: looking for something completely unrelated.  In short, running the script on a file will start a simple webserver and produce an address you can pass on to a friend in place of emailing it or dropboxing it.    That friend on your local network can drop that address in a browser or use a command like wget and grab the file; the server shuts down and everyone is happy. It also will take a directory, zip it up and send that along too.

I use this with my wife sometimes when we are on our home network, working together and I’m to lazy to drop a file on our shared server.  It’s a bit more handy when out and about at a coffee shop or library and we need to quickly share something larger than would be reasonable with bluetooth.  It works well with all the unixes I tried it on, including my maemo device (n800).  Since the Maemo 4 does telephony does not support file transfers I can just use woof to do a transfer while chatting locally with bonjour.

Obviously there are a million and one ways of moving files and directories about, but I like the bare simplicity and utilitiy of this on a local network.

Update 10/24/2010:

Yes I use dropbox and similar services to share stuff on my local network.  Its even lazier than the woof script but really what was holding me back was my poor old n800 running maemo with no easy way to connect with these syncing services.  If the files are sensitive and I really do not want them to go out to a third party without my own encryption on them – then I do one of two things:

• use giver – works well if others are using linux and is an easy install via repositories.
• Use lysncd to sync stuff to my home server.  This location is auto shared with other family members on the home network.  This works with my various linux devices as well (which do not have dropbox clients available).