Introduction.

Glitter User's Guide
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# Chapter 1. Introduction.

Glitter is an easy to use GUI application for retrieving binaries from newsgroups. Glitter uses gary, a Perl script, to actually retrieve the binaries. Gary is based on Mark Stantz's Assemble Usenet Binaries (aub) Perl program. The following is an extract from the Assemble Usenet Binaries manual and should give you an understanding of the purpose of gary

# What is aub?

> More and more people are posting binary files to usenet these days. Some of these binaries are executables and audio data; a majority seem to be pictures of various things, typically landscapes, movie stars and naked people. Because of limitations in the type data that usenet can accommodate, binaries must be encoded into text, and because binary files are commonly very large relative to text files usenet was designed to handle, they frequently must be broken up into pieces. Programs have been developed which take a given binary, encode it, and automatically post it in pieces with descriptive subject lines.

> When this data arrives at a remote site, users see subject lines that look something like this:

>     		12011 roadkill03.gif, part 1/4
>     		12012 roadkill03.gif, part 3/4
>     		12013 More pictures of tatooed children, please...
>     		12014 Re: roadkill02.gif -- I love the way the eyes bulge out
>     		12015 roadkill03.gif, part 4/4
>     		12016 roseanne_nude.jpg, part 02 of 02
>     	   	12017 Only BINARIES should be posted here, GOD DAMMIT
>     		12018 roadkill03.gif, part 2/4
>     		12019 HI, I'M BIFF!!!!  THESE PIX ARE WAY COOL!!!!
>     		12020 roseanne_nude.jpg, part 01 of 02

> While the process of encoding and splitting up binaries for posting to usenet is relatively straightforward, the process of retrieving, sorting, and decoding the pieces (which do not necessarily arrive in order) at receiving sites is less straightforward, tedious, time consuming, and very prone to human error.

> aub, which stands for "assemble usenet binaries", automates this reassembly process for you. aub is intended for use in newsgroups to which binaries are posted exclusively. When run, it accesses news articles via an NNTP news server, determines whether or not any new binaries have appeared in selected newsgroups since the last time it was run, and if so, retrieves, organizes and decodes them, depositing them in a configurable location. This process requires no human intervention once aub has been configured. aub also keeps track of binaries which it has seen some, but not all, of the pieces of. It remembers how to find these old pieces, so that when new, previously missing pieces arrive at your site, it will build the entire binary the next time it is run. It also remembers which binaries it has already seen all of the pieces of already, so that it does not waste time rebuilding the same binaries over and over again.

> aub was created as a time saver; too many people at too many sites were spending way too much time manually unpacking binary files. Its ability to identify and assemble binary images depends on people posting images with subject lines that observe (loosely) established conventions.

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