The Design and Implementation of laffer1

This is the last week of classes. Finals are next week. I have 1 class left this week (discrete tomorrow).

I went to the "review" session earlier. He went over test answers again and how to get them. I might still pass that course if i get my final grade up a bit.

I'm meeting caryn for lunch later. She wanted to go tuesday, but I didn't get the time for it.

Henry is sitting on the arm of my computer chair with me. He's been a little irritated because we won't let him eat everything. (diet)

I learned about some kewl software called bit torrent. It allows you to download files using others bandwith. Its not exactly like P2P gnutella stuff. Instead of using a client to search and waste bandwith having other people search, you go on the web to find .torrent files. Then, using these torrent files, you are able to access a "tracker". The tracker keeps track of all the people downloading and allows many peers to share their downstream/upstream. If a file is popular, you get awesome bandwith. If its not, then you get crap. (usually extremely slow or not at all) It looks like all types of files are shared with the method including legitimate and illegal content. I've seen torrent files for movies, software, tv shows, fonts, and other stuff. A quick search in google for torrent files will get you a lot of sources.

There are a few facts about the technology that are not clear and several that bother me. For one thing, the tracker and peers could EASILY track who is downloading what. In fact, there is an open source program on sourceforge for that task. Given a tracker file, anyone can track how many are downloading and their ip. Its certainly not good for music as the RIAA would have a field day. It seems popular in the US and Germany. I've seen a lot of german dub versions of movies and stuff. For smaller files that a lot of people want, you can't beat it. Apps like limewire are better for not so common files provided the person on the other end stays online long enough to get it.

Bit torrent is available for many platforms. I've used the mac client, but i know there are many windows clients.

My personal review of different file sharing things goes like this:

1. Bearshare (but its got spyware so you must install on a temporary install, or uninstall it after a few days and do a restore point in XP) I'd also use ad aware or similar afterword.

2. Bit Torrent seems like it has great potential especially for movies, and software if you are into that. I may use this technology for my jewel site download section.

3. Limewire is nice when you don't want to run on windows. The windows version has spyware but the other versions are much cleaner (linux and mac). The linux version is by far the fastest and most efficient. The Mac version consumes 512mb ram in no time. I had good success building my own version from the CVS repository and cleaning out BS like the media player and some of the panes to lower the memory usage. I switched back to a prebuilt version which seemed to fix some of the crashes and memory usage problems in 10.3 Mac OS. I must say that limewire uses way to much memory and the thread count is more than top can register. It opens a thread for EVERY connection and EVERY task. I would wager it would run much better on caryn's box with 2 cpu's. (provided its thread safe and java can use them)

The real problem is the memory usage for spawning a bazillion threads. lol. My hacked version had about 72 threads running when i was downloading 2 files and sharing 10. (no one was retrieving a file at the time)

Finally, if you want music i would suggest buying it through iTunes. Its only 99 cents a song and the quality is awesome. I've bought 187 tracks or so.

Caryn got a discount on an acedemic copy of VS.Net 2003. The cds are going to be shipped next week. That is so kewl. We are going to install it in VPC for the time being until i get my PC back.

Its the professional version with acedemic restrictions on use. Basically VB, C#, C++. Scary thing is i could probably use all three languages now. C# is a lot like Java only with subtle name changes. There are java to C# converters even.

I've been toying with getting a Pocket PC handheld. My first choice would be to get a laptop, but unless i find a good used one cheap i might as well hold out. I did see a nice one on ebay a few days ago. 200 bucks.. apple powerbook. It couldn't run OSX though. I do have a lot of classic apps still. It was like a 200 mhz or so. 10.1 might run with a processor upgrade. (only a 1.x gb hdd though) It had scsi, ethernet, 12 cdrom, floppy, etc.

My real eye is on one of the new iBooks. G4 with a radeon 9200 is NICE. Good gaming system right now. It would even run halo coming out this month for Mac.

Of course a 2.4 gig P4 laptop would be nice too. I could run FreeBSD 5.2 on that baby when it comes out. Linux emulation for ET and a dual boot of Windows XP Pro. I would need an onboard nvidia or ati card though to play games. Without gaming and wireless whats the point.

I like the alienware laptops on the PC front. There are a few centrino models lincluding a toshiba and compaq that are sweet too.

Even if i had the money today for a laptop, i'm not sure what i'd buy. I love Mac OS X, but FreeBSD is very sweet! its hard for me to pick between different BSD operating systems (except openbsd which sucks). I do have to say though that the founder of openbsd did great work on the netbsd sparc port in the past. If i had a sun machine, netbsd would probably be running on it. It makes solaris look like a toddler crawling to mommy compared to a formula 1 race car on I75.

Choices, choices.

I wish apple would stabalize the BSD subsystem in OSX. Software ports are behind and I can't get KDE on here anymore. Dual booting is not an option either (well maybe darwin). I'd want Netbsd or freebsd though.