Wave of sharing
lørdag, november 15, 2003
BitTorrent. I didn't really start using it until we got 864/350Kbps broadband, but damn!, it's working good. I get about 80~105KBps down with 30KBps up. Anything above that (max 40) and the downrate decrease on a logarithmic scale to about 50KBps.
For those that don't know, Bittorrent is a unique way to do file-sharing. Unlike Gnutella and the like, Bittorrent is tied into the normal web, where you get .torrent files. These files tell you where you can get the real files. What I do is download .torrent-files to my disk, and open them in one of the BitTorrent clients I have. You can also click the torrent-file in your browser and let it open automatically in the Bittorrent application you use, but that makes it a little awkward if you want to resume. After you open the .torrent files in the app, it will connect to the server that has the information about where to get the file. - And this is where it gets interesting: The server tells you where, and you connect to a multitude of other users that are downloading the same file, but they also connect to you. The actual file is downloaded in small chunks, and everyone must share chunks with others.
What is also very neat, is that you can resume downloading the file even if the people that you were getting chunks from have disconnected. The client just gets the rest from other, presumably new, users. The name Bittorrent reflects this process. A torrent is a swarm of somthing, in this case, bits. This is also the drawback of bittorrent: You can't get a hold of very obscure files, only files that people want are shared. It's like the discussion down at the pub: When a subject of discussion is out-dated, noone really cares about it and you won't get a quality discussion of you try to raise it again.
The reason I'm so exited about bittorent is that it is a collaborational kind of downloading: While you download, you also have to upload, this makes it possible to get the file from anywhere at any time.
It is also possible to resume using another computer! I was downloading the Knoppix Linux distro on one of our machines using a client called Burst!, and got interrupted by one of the family members... So I went over to my own PC and though hmm, maybe I can resume using this one? The torrent-directory on our 'family-PC' is a share, so it should be possible. On this machine I have the Experimental client, which is a little more light-weight. So I opened the same (shared) .torrent file and choose the same (shared) place to save it, and viola! I was resuming download using a different client, and a different machine alltogether!
Koolness in the taskbar
lørdag, november 08, 2003
Ever since I started using the internet, I've used various toolbars for searching the internet. Among them include metaeureka's toolbar, and winbar.
Both are kinda overkill if you want just websearch. Metaeureka's solution is indeed very handy, it includes many tools, like clipboard history, sms, password keeper, ping, traceroute etc-etc. "38 useful tools in one program".
Winbar is more in the system-monitoring avenue, giving you processor/memory-usage, monitor-resolution changing and the like.
I like them both, but now there is a better one for just web-search. You guessed it: Google Deskbar
It's the google toolbar in your windows taskbar, albeit with a few extras.. I really thought it would be all google, but you can actually define your own engines too, and that even easier than in Opera... Which, btw, frontiered the pop-up window which google is hereby giving you the results in. Opera made the results purely text, while this toolbar gives you the whole google-site in a resizable window. No browser needed, although it of course uses the IE rendering engine.
Jawol. I'll have to try it out. Maybe, just maybe, I'll start there instead of in Opera..
