After trying for a couple days to get the Squid http proxy software installed on my office CygWin system (to bypass the hotel’s blocking system, so that I can get a secure connection over their open wireless system), I’ve given up on it. I don’t know of any way to have the office machine download the several-megabyte source-code tarball without me manually typing in a dozen or so FTP commands (which isn’t possible in the time I have before my SSH connection is interrupted).

As I still can’t avoid Windows on that machine (due to the VTech Skype phones that only work with Windows 2000 or XP), I’ve decided to create a VMware virtual box on it, running Ubuntu Linux, purely as an SSH server. That way, I’ll have a real Linux system to work with in the future, with useful utilities like wget (which would have solved this problem quite neatly).

Fortunately, this is the last night we’ll be at this hotel. Hopefully the other two on our itinerary won’t be running such a brain-dead system.

And a Happy Turkey Day to our US readers. 🙂