Listics

Loved the preview and can’t wait for the film!

Technorati Tags: Twitter, blame it on the lisa nova, lisa nova

Stanislav Shalunov, Director of Engineeering for BitTorrent, Inc. presented a paper at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Infrastructure Workshop in Boston today (PDF) calling for IETF support in resolving user performance and ISP congestion problems by standardizing a mechanism improving cache discovery for Peer to Peer (P2P) applications. That’s a mouthful.

People using BitTorrent can experience response time delays of from 2 to 4 seconds while uploading files because of buffers filling up in their communications equipment. This makes impractical the use of other applications such as games and real time communications (applications requiring sub-second response times) while files are being uploaded.

The paper suggests that vendors (ISPs) support P2P applications by improving caching, cache discovery (peer selection), and congestion control. It concludes,

Our μTorrent client, with 35M active installs, is one of the most popular and probably the most popular is the U.S. We’re looking forward to implementing standard ways of making it work better for the users and the ISPs and we believe that the vendors of other popular BitTorrent clients would follow because this would improve the experience of the users of their clients.

(Shalunov twitters fun things like, “Bob became evil because he sat next to my raincoat in a restaurant: he subverted TCP fairness by opening two Firefox tabs at once,” and “When I have a spare decade, I’ll write the Sucklopedia, which will document the ways in which everything, alphabetically, sucks.” You can follow him here.)

Technorati Tags: BitTorrent, Shalunov, Sucklopedia, P2P

Fiddled around with the upgrade today. Also working on a new layout, but I’ve put everything back together the way it has been, I think. If you notice any weirdities that my install of 2.5.1 may have caused, leave me a comment or send me a note. Please. It would be very NICE of you to do so.

Technorati Tags: wordpress upgrade, niceness

National Library Week was last week. Nevertheless…

For the girl who already has her little pony: Accessorize! Accessorize! Accessorize!

The Glambo Signature Series “My Little Pony” M4A1 carbine with forward handgrip and AN-PVS4 night vision sight. This fully functional weapon fires standard 5.56mm ammunition — great for those AR-15 fans with extra ammo lying around the house or even extra parts! (Note: the full-auto selection has been disabled in this model in favor of three-round-burst. This product cannot be shipped to California.) The perfect way to introduce your little princess to the wonders of nocturnal wet-work!
A bargain at only $1,147.95! (Compare to stock M4’s at $1,300.00!)

And if “My Little Pony” isn’t the semi-auto for you, there’s a fully functional “Hello Kitty” Kalashnikov available with a hand crocheted pink shoulder stock muffler!

And what girl wouldn’t love the Lady Di .460 S&W handgun? “The most beautiful woman in the world on the most powerful handgun in the world.” I’m not sure but I think you can get the Rainbow Brite reloader set-up to load 300 grain .460 magnums, just what you need for a flat shooting “big game” perimeter of 250 yards and a ten inch kill circle!

Take a picture.  Upload it to mugr.com.  Identify the phizz.  Might give it a whirl with my recent Halloween misery man.  But then, that would take the fun out of the drive-by nature of the shot, wouldn’t it?

Might as well get this off my chest, since I need to contrive a test post for my WP 2.3 upgrade. I am disappointed by the Typepad migration. During the years I used Typepad, I was pretty casual about my use of their photo album features. I had FlickR to share photos and used Typepad to blog. So most of the photos I included with posts were dumped into a directory called photos/uncategorized. Some of the best bloggers do this. Now I seem to be faced with the challenge of copying each of those images individually back out and uploading them here and editing the posts they came from to point to the new image locations. While the Typepad export created a nice text file that Word Press was able to handle to recreate each of the posts here, there is no provision for migrating images so each of the image links still points back to Typepad. Since this is all being done to avoid paying another year of Typepad fees, I rather resent the way that Six Apart has left me hanging here.

Technorati Tags: Six Apart, Typepad, bloggers roach motel, the posts go in but they don’t come out, uncategorized photos, live trap

Googlezon is here. The New York Times has not shut its doors and the Web 2.0 boutiques remain open on O’Reilly Street, but Googlezon is here.  All the real opportunity imagined for charting our own courses on the web has emerged, but lurking in the deep water just offshore are Google and Amazon, the two most powerful and influential players on the commercial web. On the surface, Web development and design is a happening business. Web publishing has exploded. Social networks thrive in these cyber-seas, networks of hobbyists, gamers, co-religionists, scholars, scientists, philosophers and artists coalesce with soft boundaries that allow overlap and cross pollination.

And the glue that holds everyone’s connections together is (or could be, or should be) Google. Beside Google rests the Amazon retail powerhouse, an enterprise that will ultimately crush brick and mortar retailers from the local book store to Wal-Mart. The sentimentalist in me wonders if this is a good thing. The realist acknowledges that it may be neither bad nor good, just different.

A lot of twittering and IM chatter occurs among a small subset of websters.   Huge hives form and reform in gathering places like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.  The Web has altered American and global democracy to an extent not yet ascertained. Online transactions and networked cash machines have all but replaced the teller lines at the bank. But beneath all this, Google helps us find what we seek, track what we’ve found, communicate and create.

Are you concerned about privacy, about putting your history in the hands of a BigCo? So what! AT&T and the US government have already ripped you off in that regard. I have a lot to learn about empowering myself in the Google and Amazon markets, but I have a feeling that my time will be better spent there than trying to get a handle on Facebook APIs.