April 2004 - Posts

Now this surprised me.

 

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Linked from Davenetics, the 10th Anniversary of spam is today. (news.com)

I get more junk-mail in my physical mailbox than I do bills or anything else. And I know that costs money. I wonder how they will ever stop the flow of Spam. :(

There's been a lot of talk about the Community Tech Releases, and how large to make the availability (and how to distribute it) A lot of people suggest some sort of P2P mechansim (I agree), and several suggest BitTorrent (I also agree, but have some caveats)

Bittorrent is a P2P client designed for single large files or collections. It seems to be unique in that a single “torrent” can contain many files, but it will still only treat it as one download. I understand it's used for World of Warcraft Beta, but since I'm not on that, I can't say for sure how it works. But RedHat uses it for their new Fedora Project downloads. The have about 10 torrents available (A couple of full DVDs, one with 32 bit, one with 64 bit, two sets of CDs (3 install CDs, & 3 source CDs)) The DVDs were single ISOs, but the CDs were three ISOs, but you only had to download them as one unit. Nice. The protocol itself makes a great concept for download of large files/distributions.

The problem comes in that the way RedHat uses the program is really rough. You are invited to “join the torrent“, given a link to the main download, basic firewall adjusting instructions, and the list of links. From there, you're on your own. It'll download, but you have no control over how many peers, max download speed, etc... I think the best solution would be to wrap the BitTorrent tool in a download manager, and allow it to handle all the sundry tasks (capturing the main file, setting the directory, handling the firewall, etc...) In large part, disasocciate it from BitTorrent in general, just use the technology. This will present a much better face, and probably make it a much better experience.

And allow a way to throttle download speed. When downloading Linux, it when't full speed, and I couldn't do anything else on the machine, except by stopping and restarting, which meant I had time while it reconnected to everybody.

My wife and I just got back from a Disney Land and Sea Cruise (I'll talk about it off the main feed) but I learned some interesting things about technology.

When preparing for a vacation, you have a large list of mundane things to do (board the pets, stop the mail, board the children, check the stove, etc...) but this time around, we've got the Tivo to worry about. Since we're watching Charmed (every day) and Kingom Hospital, and Touching Evil, and some other stuff, I didn't want anything deleted while I was gone. So, into the todo menu to set all the shows to not delete, and thenstop other shows so there is definitely room to tape everything while we're gone. And go over two days past when we get home so we have some time to watch some of them :) So we've just spent 7 days on a wonderful vacation, now it's time to spend about two more days watching TV <grin>

My wife and I just got back from a Disney Land and Sea Cruise (I'll talk about it off the main feed) but I learned some interesting things about technology.

We bought a new digital camera for the trip. It's a nice Sony still with MPEG capabilities. However, everything that could go wrong did. I took half the charger, but forgot the other half, so I was stuck with two batteries, and no way to recharge (fortunately, they found a Sony cord on the ship, so I got them recharged right when they died, and that was good for the rest of the trip.) The lesson is either buy a camera that takes regular batteries, or triple check your cords.

Second, I bought a 256 MB memory card. Scaled it down to 3.1 Megapixel so that fit about 200 pictures. But, since it wasn't a sony card, I couldn't find anything but the camera to read it, so I couldn't offload to disc, but it read the 32MB Sony, I was so frustrated. Never buy a non-sony SD card. Grrr...

But we're back now, with close too 300mb of pictures, and two full cameras to develop, so that should be plenty of pictures.

 

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