Oblomovka

2002-07-30»

Jorn's just linked to the very funny Verity Stob journals, so I guess I can now. Verity was my first boss, actually - we both worked on or near a magazine called .EXE in the early Nineties. One of my proudest claims is that I'm the annoying new office boy who sets fire to a UNIX box in one of the earlier columns. The girl Adrian Mole should have married, if life were kinder to him, and even crueller to Verity.

2002-07-25»

Bram Cohen , the man behind CodeCon and other fine goods and services, has a problem. He's been working on an excellent P2P utility for the last six months or so, called BitTorrent. The idea behind BT is brilliant - it's a helper application for browsers that lets you download large files (like movies) from multiple locations at the same time. One site is the original location - the others are all the other BitTorrent users who are downloading the file at the same time. In return, you share the bits of the file you've already grabbed to other downloaders. It's like instant, distributed mirroring. It takes the load off the original server and increases the speed of everyone's file grab . The throttled bandwidth taken by others uploading is not noticeable (after all, you're already filling much of your pipe with your download anyway), and unlike most P2P apps, it all goes away as soon as you've finished downloading anyway.

Anyway, Bram's in the final stages of stress testing his code - but he's got a problem. BitTorrent currently shrugs off every load test he's thrown at it, but even in the middle of a slashdotting, he's only ever seen twenty or so people doing a simultaneous download of his test files. In the words of Bram:

I'm now in the very bizarre position of having to beg for people to download porn. The page of the current load test (a 700+ meg file) is http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/porn.html.

Windows, Unix tars and a Debian package of BitTorrent are available from Bram's site.I've suggested that he get hold of the ISOs to the full Debian 3.0 install CDs - the equivalent of pr0n among the Free Software sexless beings of pure energy.

Debian users who have not yet sublimated can get their kicks with
wget http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/bittorrent_2.9.8-0_all.deb
dpkg -i bittorrent_2.9.8-0_all.deb
/usr/bin/btdownloadheadless.py --url \
   http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/Blonds_On_Fire_avi.torrent --saveas porn.avi


2002-07-24»

ExxonMobil tried to have the French version of the Stop Esso protest site shut down. The French court threw out all of Exxon's claims (including a bid to have "Esso" removed from the pages' meta tags), except for one - that Stop Esso can't use their parody of the Esso logo.

So the French language Stop Esso site has moved ISPs - to one in Houston, Texas. Right next to ExxonMobil's Baytown refinery. Parody is a protected speech under US law.