Saturday, May 28, 2005

Joshua's News, Etc

Poor Josh, couldn't even find his own blog earlier today. The thing is poorly updated, and I can't very well recommend you visit, save for the pictures of our beautiful house cat he occasionally posts. But.. here's a link to it, just so it shows up in google at all.

Saturday, May 21, 2005

Strange Times.

Some sadnesses, we're losing Todd. Todd's our most experienced programmer, and the siren song of money and other things have combined, he's off to establish an IT department for a new company. I'll miss him. Also, it will hold up progress. This brings us down to only three full-time people, making me hope that the search for a CTO is closed soon. Peter has seen a few candidates from locally and at least one that flew in, but I'm not really involved in that.

I've managed to avoid the various geekouts of the past few weeks, the ending of Star Trek, the latest Star Wars movie (I will watch it on my computer when it's convenient).

Despite my busyness, I've had time to dream up more things to occupy my time with. We'll see if anything comes of that.

Monday, May 16, 2005

Some interesting things today, I staved off metro police attention by getting an extension on a traffic ticket, and helping josh wander about to get a light fixed on the company limo.

Crystal is back safely to Utah, and I'm getting back in earnest to work.

I have some theoretical programming studying I'm doing in my copious off-time, Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, and a C# cookbook from Oreilly are up for a closer read. I'm mostly satisfied with my programming, (it's workman-like, and slow, but usually decently factored by the time I get done with it), but with so much coming up, I really feel I need to get familiar, fast, and more 'authoritative'. Usually I'm quite satisfied with my autodidactism, but the completeness of formal study confers some advantages I have to admit.

Another project is to revive my on-again, off-again personal productivity software, which has task time clocks, and schedulers and onscreen alarms and such. I don't know when, but sometime soon I need to get that up and running again, both for comparative study, to see how my work habits have drifted since I last used it, and to see if I can improve it to the point where it's not too annoying to use all the time. We'll see. I have some new window's hooking tricks now from work, so perhaps it can automagically do everything without any need for clicking.

It's been a bit silent in the world of AI, except for the occasional internal chatter, and a bit of articles and rehashes. No major fallout from Jeff Hawkins yet, heard a bit about Goertzel indirectly, No new pronouncements or projects. I've been snooping about narrow-AI and related websites like Generation5, some of them almost seem like they could be pushed into interesting-ness with a few submitted articles, but who has the time. We'll see.

Friday, May 13, 2005

Broadcast Machine: Publish RSS / Torrent Video Channels

I'm back from my trip, as of wednesday, but I'm still trying to catch up to work, and the events of the world.

Crystal is here until sunday.

The above ia another part of the Participatory Culture Foundation, it sounds very interesting.

Another thing to watch is the underlayer of the Azureus update I mentioned last week, which is the I2p network/protocol.

Monday, May 02, 2005

Azureus is a very very interesting project just now.

for those in the know, BitTorrent is the best way to get high traffic files served from places that may not neccesarily have the central bandwidth to do so.

BitTorrent is occasionally accused of just being for pirates. It's true that BitTorrent is a bigger player in piracy than Napster ever was, but besides that, it has many legit uses. VCRs have probably been used to 'pirate' more tv shows than every computer program put together, but have enough other uses to keep the corps from their door. I have similar hopes that BitTorrent will simply be too useful to ban.

Azureus is a java client for BitTorrent, a multi torrent manager. It has many good point from a management perspective, and is a good example of good use of Java.

Azureus has just upgraded to 2.3.0.0, and a bounty it is. Besides the plugins, the protocol upgrade, and other niceties, it introduces a feature strangely familiar to those following the demise of SuprNova.org.

(For those not following such minutia, SuprNova.org was a torrent tracker site, which served many many people. It was a nest of piracy and old game files, videos, and a lot more. After it was shut down by mysterious persons, a bold new initiative was announced, a way to use BitTorrent with NO trackers. Which would make such a network impossible to prosecute, save by going after each and every user. Exeem was announced with some fanfare, which dulled to dislike once it became clear it was stuffed with adware)

Azureus now supports decentralised torrents. And also continuing once hosted torrents, when they lose their tracker.

I have no idea how that will work, but I only hope they will work with other torrent clients and possibly update the original torrent spec to ensure standards and interopability. I wouldn't want it dependent on even so good an open-source client as azureus.

Of course, azureus continues to work with plain old torrents off of trackers, which I continue to use it for almost exclusively. I just got the latest version of Knoppix via torrent very quickly, considering it's near 700 mb size. Very spicy indeed.