More Signal, Less Noise
Monday, May 23, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 20 Monday, May 23, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF With the release of "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" there is a mini-flood of things Star Wars floating about the Internet. Here's a small selection of a few oddball items. First, we have the collection of Unfortunate Star Wars Costumes, a hilarious round-up of truly unfortunate sartorial choices worn by the equally unfortunate fans. We have Google Groups to thank for the exhumation of the net.movies.sw Usenet newsgroup, circa 1983-1985. Oddly enough, threads with topics like "Will there be another?" and even the joking "request for pirated movies" seem as topical today as they were 20 years ago. The Star Wars Technical Commentaries bring us detailed, thoroughly researched explanations of how physical laws work in the Star Wars universe. Let's try to end this madness - for the moment at least, there really is no end to this - with the Star Wars Kid Videos page, featuring remixes that pay tribute to the immortal legacy of Ghyslain Raza, the original Star Wars Kid.Unfortunate Star Wars Costumes: http://www.capnwacky.com/sw/sw01.html net.movies.sw: net.movies.sw Technical Commentaries: http://www.theforce.net/swtc/ Star Wars Kid Videos: http://www.screamingpickle.com/members/StarWarsKid/ Google Personalized, and Google Ads in RSS Feeds The latest feature from Google Labs lets you personalize your own Google home page with a variety of information. Google seems to be evolving into a portal much like AltaVista and Yahoo and Netscape, all of which started simple before offering this sort of thing. Could this be the ultimate fate of all major Web-based companies? As of press time, Google's personalization service let you add up to 12 different modules to your own page, including features like Gmail, stock/weather/movie info, and several news sources, including the New York Times, BBC News, and Slashdot (what, no NSD?!). In order to get your personal Google page, you need sign up for a free Google account. In other news, Google has also started an ad program for RSS and Atom feeds under the label AdSense for Feeds. Content producers can now embed ads in their news feeds much like they embed Google ads on their Web pages. Look around in the Google Blog for short items on both features.Googel personalization: http://www.google.com/ig AdSense for Feeds: http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/topic.py?topic=957 Google Blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ Mars News: Surveyor Snaps Odyssey, Opportunity Digs out Though it's no longer front-page news, Mars is still a hotbed of scientific activity as two active rovers and a small fleet of orbiters continue to gather data about the planet. This week, Mars Global Surveyor returned a photograph of its orbital companion, Odyssey. Both craft travel similar polar orbits, Odyssey slightly higher. One neat consequence of the relative motions and the photographic technology involved made Odyssey appear twice in the same photograph. NASA's Planetary Photojournal page has a diagram. This is not the first time Surveyor has photographed another Mars craft. In April, Surveyor photographed the ESA's Mars Express craft in orbit; the ESA has that one. Down below, the Mars rovers are going strong, although Opportunity is trying to dig itself out of a sand trap. NASA was concerned that the rover might be permanently stuck, but centimeter by centimeter the rover is moving. You can track its progress in the Opportunity Update Archive.Planetary Photojournal: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA07941 ESA: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMI5QZCU8E_0.html Opportunity: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status_opportunity.html E3: Electronic Entertainment Expo "Praise the Lord and pass the PlayStation" reads one of the headlines on CNET's coverage of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), now winding down. This year's main story is the dueling next generation of home game consoles, but there are a few other nifty nuggets to be had. Will Wright showed off an evolution-based game of conquest called Spore (see MSNBC), while others aim Christian-themed games at the market. Elsewhere, Nintendo targets animal lovers with Nintendogs, in which you pick a cute little puppy and train it. You can even schedule puppy playtimes with other Nintendogs owners. Sappy? Perhaps. But if it brings in dollars, who cares? Besides the unavoidable buckets of hype slung by Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony over their forthcoming consoles, you can get a heads-up on the forthcoming games at GameSpot.E3: http://www.e3insider.com/portal.html CNET: http://news.com.com/2009-1043_3-5706442.html MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7923094/ GameSpot: http://www.gamespot.com/e3/index.html If you're a serious gamer of standard means, you've got some planning to do. Microsoft already has you drooling over the upcoming Xbox 360 (sorta), likely available in time for Christmas. Now at E3, Sony has released details about its PlayStation 3 (PS3), due next year. As usual, the two companies are engaged in a bragging contest, each trying to outdo the other with the technical wizardry of their consoles. Some of it is smoke, of course, but both machines do seem to be serious pieces of hardware. The PS3 will be powered by a potent processor running at 3.2 GHz and use a powerful Nvidia graphics chip with more than 300 million transistors and capable of 1.8 teraflops of floating-point performance. Sony also managed to get a whole slew of game developers to plug its upcoming product at E3, many of whom also provided glimpses of some of the new games they're planning for the PS3's graphic capability. Like the next Xbox, Sony's new gaming machine will have online capability and, unlike its predecessor, will support a wide range of portable media. GameSpot has technical details - Sony's own Flash presentation is annoying and unnecessarily busy. GameSpot: http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/16/news_6124681.html PS3: http://e3.playstation.com/index.aspx Why We Wrote "Sorta" in the Last Article Above, we wrote that "Microsoft already has you drooling over the upcoming Xbox 360 (sorta)...." Your drool may be real, but if you've been salivating over the Xbox 360 play shown on MTV or at E3, you've really been drooling over Mac G5s. Ironic, no? The CPU in the Xbox 360 is essentially the same CPU Apple uses for the G5s, so the software can be ported between the platforms fairly easily. AnandTech reveals the evidence. Note that one comment on the article reveals that the operating system the G5s were running was a ported version of Windows NT. CNET has Microsoft's admission. Our question, one that's possibly rhetorical, is whether these games will actually be released for the Mac. We won't hold our breath.AnandTech: http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2420&p=5 CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1043_3-5706658.html Report on Insiders Who Threaten Your Infrastructure Here's a useful report on insider threats to corporate computing based on a series of investigations into incidents of sabotage aimed mostly at computer systems by disgruntled employees, past employees, and contract workers. The paper's authors hope to raise awareness of the damage insiders can and do cause and to develop ways to mitigate the threat. The work is a collaboration between the US Secret Service and Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute. Although the study only examined a few incidents, with fairly little financial damage (mostly less than $100,000), that such things happen underscores the vulnerability of critical systems. Between identifying the problem and proposing solutions, the 45-page report looks at lots of data and trends and is worth a look if you're at all involved in keeping infrastructure secure. Although there's no clear demographic to malicious insiders, personnel who have been disciplined or otherwise disappointed are most likely to commit harmful acts. The best way to deter workers from committing such acts is to establish and publicize clear policies to identify and deal with disgruntled workers.http://www.secretservice.gov/ntac/its_report_050516.pdf Contagious Media Showdown Off and Running The Contagious Media Showdown, which we briefly mentioned in NSD 11.16, is a competition in the design and promotion of Web sites. The site that draws the most visitors in a set amount of time wins. The contest is off and running, and sure enough some of the sites designed to snare your eyeballs are spreading in the Net's typical viral manner. At press time, the leader, by far, was Crying While Eating, which features strangely compelling video of people - you guessed it - crying while eating. We have no real clue why this particular meme is so popular. We can only speculate that the lonely, tear-filled meal is a familiar staple of the bloggers and e-mail forwarders who are spreading it. (We're reporting it, not spreading it. There's a difference. Really there is.) The contest made the grade at Slashdot, which led one person to remark that the Slashdot effect could only favor those sites already in the lead and thus listed before the others.Contagious Media Showdown: http://showdown.contagiousmedia.org/ NSD 11.16: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.16.html#BS15 Crying While Eating: http://cryingwhileeating.com/ Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/20/1217228 The Shared Future of Television Ernie Kovacs observed that television was a medium because it was neither rare nor well done. Even Kovacs might have found these two articles on the future of television on the Net to be examples of how the medium is going to change whether its current corporate controllers want it to or not. In the Seattle Times, you can read about how the Internet makes cable's identifiable suite of niches look as precisely targeted as strategic bombing in World War II. Online television streams allow for a degree of specialization that cable advertisers should envy. Meanwhile, Mindjack looks at how free online distribution on the premiere of the new "Battlestar Galactica" may have increased the size of the broadcast audience. Piracy might just be a television producer's, and advertiser's, best friend.Seattle Times: http://tinyurl.com/dq6ha Mindjack: http://mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html Chicken-Touching Heralds Dawn of New Net Tech We're not sure if this is for real, but Wired claims that researchers in the Mixed Reality Lab at the National University of Singapore have developed a way to allow computer users to touch and feel remote objects. The example at hand, so to speak, is a chicken, which users can pet over the Net. Users touch a model chicken and experience the sensation of actually touching a living chicken. If this works, imagine the implications for porn, let alone chickens. Caveat emptor. We're still forlornly waiting for the DigiScents iSmell.... (See NSD 6.13.)Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,67513,00.html Mixed Reality Lab: http://www.mixedrealitylab.org/ NSD 6.13: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v06/nsd.06.13.html#SS21 Google Sponsors US Puzzle Championships Google is known as a company that likes to recruit clever people. Their recruitment advertising regularly emphasizes the challenging problems they want you to solve, and the company sponsors fiendishly difficult programming contests to find the best hackers around. In this spirit, Google has become the sponsor of the US World Puzzle Federation championship. This year's contest will take place online on June 18. Contestants will have two and a half hours to solve as many puzzles as they can. The top two finishers will join the US team at the World Puzzle Championship in Hungary, Oct. 8-13. If you suspect you have what it takes to compete at this level, you may want to check out the practice test or the 2004 US championship test before you throw your hat into the ring.US Puzzle Championship: http://wpc.puzzles.com/index.htm Practice test: http://wpc.puzzles.com/practice/index.htm 2004 test: http://wpc.puzzles.com/gt-IV/index.htm Foodie Things to Do Before You Die There's always a tussle between indulgence and doing what we know is right. Spending rather than saving, watching TV rather than exercising, eating steak rather than gobbling a light salad. Observer Food Monthly (OFM) has a delicious way to make those choices harder, with a list of 50 things to eat and where to eat them. Contributors submitted their choices to help OFM celebrate its 50th edition. Most of us may not manage to complete this fairly ambitious list before it's game over. Sure, serious "save the world" types will huff at the sheer self-indulgent irresponsibility of it all, but sometimes you really just have to ask yourself what life all about anyhow. Some of the ideas are distinctly quirky and probably won't serve everyone, so feel free to pick and choose. The point is to indulge yourself, do something grand and silly and ridiculous - or, in some cases, ordinary but in damn-the-consequences style, like fresh white bread toasted and slathered with salted butter and eaten before the butter has had time to melt completely. Yum.http://observer.guardian.co.uk/foodmonthly/story/0,9950,1481375,00.html The Story Behind the Paris Hilton Phone Hack Earlier this year, hackers broke into tabloid celebrity Paris Hilton's T-Mobile cell-phone account (see NSD 11.08). They made off with Hilton's virtual rolodex of celebrity phone numbers and a stash of her sometimes candid phonecam photos. When the story broke, analysts quickly determined that the hackers gained entry through a flaw in the T-Mobile Web site that allowed anyone who knew a phone number to gain access to that number's account. The Washington Post reports the story behind the Hilton hack and makes clear that the hack also relied on a bit of old-fashioned social engineering. It seems that the hackers phoned a T-Mobile store employee and convinced him to give out the login info for an internal administrative interface. From there, they learned Hilton's phone number, which let them hack into her account.NSD 11.08: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.08.html Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/19/AR2005051900711.html Wired reports on porn stars who blog, and porn gossip sites. These blogs reveal the behind-the-scenes takes on what it's really like to live and work in the San Fernando Valley sex business. And you thought your job sucked. Imagine trying to keep things up and running while missing lunch with a co-worker who has fallen asleep on the set. Yes, life is hard. Like basketball, this is a job only for the young. If you've ever entertained the idea of doing LA style professional porn, take a look. You may want to re-think your position. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67524,00.html ONLINE CULTURE Dan Gillmor Takes First Step in Open Journalism Dan Gillmor, one of the great tech journalists of our time, has finally launched his long-awaited open-journalism project. Gillmor left the San Jose Mercury News at the end of 2004 to prepare a grassroots venture in journalism, and it has finally arrived, called the Bayosphere. He's moved his blog to the site, and while there's not much more than that there now, we expect that to change pretty quickly now that the site's live. Gillmor plans to open discussion forums that are likely to cover a wide range of topics - well beyond Silicon Valley tech, we suspect, despite the name of the site. This place is going to grow like English ivy in a Pacific Northwest forest. Now's the time to hop aboard. Right now, it's worth a stop just for his cutting insights. Check out his May 20 post titled "The Computer Science Shortage", for example. It'll make you rock back on your boot-heels and think for a bit. Expect more.http://bayosphere.com/ Classification and the Online World Clay Shirky always makes us think. His recent essay on classification is a great example of his ability to take something all of us notice and give it meaning. Specifically, he discusses the classification and structure of the digital world. Shirky's claim is simple, but subtle: the Web allows for a multiplicity of classification systems as individuals tag and collect sites. While these tags are idiosyncratic, the aggregation of the various schemes, such as in del.icio.us, offer multiple ways of viewing the Web. In the essay's most significant insight, Shirky explains that the Web does have an editor: all of us. This is worth re-reading a few times.http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
SURFING SITES One of the reasons for the incredible diversity of the black community in the US is the almost constant migration of its members. Indeed, this movement even predates the slave trade that brought most of the ancestors of today's black Americans to North America. The New York Public Library is offering an outstanding educational resource for studying this phenomenon. In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience follows the paths taken by blacks to and within the US. It began with the earliest arrival of blacks from Spanish territory and via the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Once in the US, free blacks passed from the south to the northern and western states. The 20th century witnessed great migrations and the expansion in immigration of blacks from Haiti and Africa. Each era is presented in its own multimedia module, with maps, images, and explanatory texts. Teachers can use the comprehensive lesson plans while their pupils will revel in the additional Web resources offered for every aspect of this story. In addition, you can browse by era by way of a timeline or a series of interactive maps. Each section also features an extensive collection of scholarly articles for those who wish to do in-depth research. Every American community should be so well served.http://www.inmotionaame.org/ What the Hudson's Bay Company Is Doing These Days Most people think of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), if at all, as a source of nice wool blankets. Amazingly, the HBC is over 100 years older than the US and, as Canadians can tell you, these days is more commonly known for its department stores. In May 1670, Charles II granted a royal charter to "the Governor and Adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay" that presented them with entire Hudson Bay watershed - an area about the size of western Europe. Over the next 200 years, the company expanded throughout northern and western Canada, building posts and forts, exploring the vast interior of the continent and trading with the natives for furs. Over time, the HBC turned sovereignty over to the government and got into retail. Still, in many ways, the history of Canada is the history of the HBC, and you can now discover the history of this remnant of the royally chartered empire-building companies. HBC's Web site devotes proper space to the company men and women, to timelines and maps, and to the HBC's development beyond beaver and canoes. Today, as well its retail outlets, the company runs several museums and galleries. The site also offers educational programs, an extensive bibliography, and even a page of activities for the kiddies. If none of this interests you, you can always shop - there's plenty to buy here as well.http://www.hbc.com/hbcheritage/ If you've ever wondered just how a lightsaber works - the real things, not the toy facsimiles that work for a week then die - you can get started at Howstuffworks. About the size of a large flashlight, the main unit is composed of the handgrip, a handy belt attachment, and the on/off switch. You need to practice in order to familiarize yourself with the heft and feel of the thing, but once comfortable with it all, it can be used with confidence for any number of purposes, whether slicing and dicing veggies for salad, dismembering foes, or melting your way through blast-doors. It's all in the settings and the handling of the device. Howstuffworks provides schematics, so do-it-yourselfers may be able to build their own. That diatium power cell may be a little hard to come by, but you could probably buy most of the rest off the shelf. Oh sure, they stress that you need other nerdy stuff as well, but chances are good that you can make do just fine with on-hand materials. Why pay $150 for new tires when you can buy recaps for around $10 apiece? If your Sith knowledge is lacking, by the way, try the site's "The Sith Explained". Howstuffworks: http://www.howstuffworks.com/lightsaber.htm "The Sith Explained": http://stuffo.howstuffworks.com/sith.htm Audio Anomalies of the Beatles What Goes On is a Web site devoted to Beatles audio anomalies. It's certain to stir memories in those of a certain age who remember when the Fab Four moved from teen idols to something darker and more mysterious - call it the Maharishi Effect. At some point, everyone was spinning records backwards, cranking up the treble, or even wiring their speakers out of phase to see what subliminal secrets the Beatles music would reveal. Weren't the lyrics mysterious enough? If you've never read about these hunts for hidden truths in the music, this Web site tries to document every quirky click, pop, and muttered conversation in every Beatles track recorded. For example, here you can find the definitive truth: Did John Lennon really say, "I buried Paul" at the end of "Strawberry Fields Forever"? The site layout is very 1996, but it is very complete and makes it easy to find any song or album in particular. Should you need more, it even offers many links to other in-depth Beatles sites.http://www.pootle.demon.co.uk/wgo.htm Wow, NSD Did This Cheesy Site Ten Years Ago If you're lactose intolerant, you may want to bypass this site as it documents, in the freakishly dedicated way in which Web sites excel, the many and varied wonders of cheese. Since CheeseNet's NSD-documented launch ten years ago (see NSD 1.16), it has gathered an enthusiastic fanbase and a lovely layout. You can read the site's cheese-inspired sonnets and wonder what Shakespeare and Petrach would have made of it all. Cheese-aholics can plan a trip on France's cheese-route, pitch bizarre questions to the famous Dr. Cheese, and even discover how to make cheese for themselves if they have access to enough milk-producing livestock. Sadly, CheeseNet's World Cheese Index, which even matches wines to cheeses, is less than complete as it omits many prize-winning farmhouse cheeses developed in the UK, Ireland, and France in recent years. However it's a good starting point for any cheese-aficionado.CheeseNet: http://65.61.15.248/default.asp NSD 1.16: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v01/nsd.95.04.21.html#SS5 Interactive Graph of Historical Name Popularity Here's a true story: a woman is nursing her newborn boy when the names-registrar comes to visit her hospital room. "His name is Jack,", she says. "Really? I just registered 12 other Jacks this morning," answers the registrar. Sometimes it pays to know if your baby's long-cherished name is being shared with thousands of others. That's where the Baby Name Wizard's nifty NameVoyager popularity graph comes in handy - for now and the past. It accesses naming records decade by decade in the US since 1900 and you can easily search it. Check your own name or that of an impending arrival. It is strangely addictive. Ebeneezer is unlikely to make a comeback, unlike Emily which dropped until the 1960s then exploded, topping the ranks of girl names in 2003. At the bottom of the NameVoyager graph, there's a link to a blog by the mom-creator of the tool in which she ruminates on the fashions in baby names and what they all mean. Oh, and the woman we mentioned? She didn't call her son Jack.http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/ Sometimes Web sites don't need one unifying theme to work. It can be more fun to simply produce a site with all those gimmicks and images you've bookmarked over the years. In Punkasspunk.com's case, it's more than just a list of links - our host has generated much of the decidedly eclectic content personally, including, apparently, the popular "The pornography cannot be displayed" fake 404 page. At Punkasspunk.com, you can view a daily self-portrait, view naked people in news headlines (we're surprised a tabloid newspaper hasn't thought of that angle before), or simply enjoy the comic reading of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Other highlights include a collection of oddly sculpted living trees, a calculator for how much coffee you'll have to drink before it kills you, and a simple encryption tool. This is one for a quiet Friday when you've nothing much to finish up at work before the weekend. Go have a rummage in the swag-bag. http://www.punkasspunk.com/ Andy Foulds has a site full of just plain Flash fun. Check out the Amusements section for entertaining diversions, or check out the Enter side for downloadable desktop wallpaper (that phrase shouldn't even make sense) and other stuff. The source code wasn't available when we visited, but other features on the site were - and broadband is the preferred mode for exploration. Granted, the content leans leftward, but centrists and righties will at least likely appreciate the technique. There's something for everyone, and that doesn't happen all that often. http://www.andyfoulds.co.uk/flash_design.html FLOTSAM & JETSAM Eighteen Ways to Hate Your European Neighbor The eXile presents an article with handy tables that illustrate what various European tribes think of each other. We're not sure why the number 18 is in the title, as that clearly underestimates the creative epithets various European national groups use for each other.http://www.exile.ru/151/materials/europeans-chart.html Self-Referential Aptitude Test This quiz is guaranteed to tie your brain into knots that even the best topologists would have a hard time unraveling. However, we are assured that there is a unique solution, once you get past the dreaded 20th question.http://www.math.wisc.edu/~propp/srat-Q Introducing Das Keyboard, a precision keyboard clearly designed for the ubertypists so elite they need never, ever glance at the keys, and priced to match the attitude. It's possibly not even real, but as far as we can tell not part of the Contagious Media Showdown. http://www.daskeyboard.com/ This graphic depiction of the history of music sampling matches sample sources with the works that used them. This Java applet is easily one of the best examples of information presentation we've ever seen. Edward Tufte would be proud. History of Sampling: http://jessekriss.com/projects/samplinghistory/ Tufte: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi Fans of old-time newspaper comics will remember the unbearably cute "Love Is..." panels with their pudgy, tastefully naked couple in saccharine romantic situations. But sensibilities change, and this blog attempts a modern reinterpretation, with "some stabs that very narrowly skirted legal action". http://theendofhumor.blogspot.com/ There have been countless parodies of Star Wars over the years, some better than others. "Store Wars" is particularly inventive, a full length promo for an organic-produce trade association. We guarantee a grin or three. If only VeggieTales were this much fun.... http://www.storewars.org/flash/index.html What at first glance would seem to be a fairly simple game of traffic control can actually get teeth-clenchingly frantic as you adjust traffic lights to prevent jams and keep everyone moving. It's definitely not for the high-strung, and strangely addictive. http://www.geheee.com/games/trafficcontrol2.html Life for the modern male doll is complicated. Levi's urges us to uncomplicate in this amusing viral ad that takes potshots at the metrosexual ethos. http://www.501uncomplicate.com/index.php Need graph paper? Don't have time to go to the store? Don't want to buy special paper and feed the graphical-industrial complex? Here's your solution. PDF files with a variety of grids for all your graphing needs. Just print and go. If you're low on blank paper, just go photocopy some. http://www.incompetech.com/beta/plainGraphPaper/ We told you about Greasemonkey in NSD 11.15. It's a Firefox plugin that makes it easy to manipulate the Web pages your browser downloads. Dive into Greasmonkey is an elegantly designed site that provides help, tutorials, and ideas for the tool. Nice minimalist site design, and a great developer resource. NSD 11.15: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.15.html#SW1 http://diveintogreasemonkey.org/ SOFTWARE Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-distributing technology continues to evolve, most recently with the release of trackerless technology for BitTorrent sharers. Formerly, whenever somebody wanted to share a file through the popular BitTorrent protocol, they had to create a small file known as a tracker as well as the more commonly known .torrent file. Users use the torrent to download the desired file - the tracker tracks who is downloading and uploading the file and invisibly controls the "network" of all users of that one shared file. As users start to download, the tracker adds them to its P2P download swarm. The latest BitTorrent technology eliminates the need for a central tracker, which was an obvious point of failure, both technical and legal. Trackerless BitTorrent sharing avoids both problems. At the moment, two major BitTorrent clients support trackerless technology, the original BitTorrent and Azureus, a cross-platform Java implementation. Check out Anders Hedstrom for a detailed technical explanation.BitTorrent: http://www.bittorrent.com/trackerless.html Azureus: http://azureus.aelitis.com/wiki/index.php/DistributedTrackerAndDatabase Hedstrom: http://www.alhem.net/project/trackerbt/ One of the most common development tools on the Internet is the mod_perl module for the Apache webserver. Many Web sites write Web-based applications in Perl, using mod_perl as the glue between their code and Apache. Not only does mod_perl make Perl Web applications run faster, but it contains numerous tools that make creating them easy. This new version is a complete rewrite made specifically to better mesh with Apache 2.0. In practical terms, this means that mod_perl now works much better with Apache 2.0's threading models and provides more extensive and cleaner hooks into Apache's internal code interfaces. The Apache Project's Perl Web site has a good overview of mod_perl in general, while the mod_perl-2.0.0 module itself, with documentation about what's new, can be obtained from CPAN. Apache Project: http://perl.apache.org/ CPAN: http://search.cpan.org/~gozer/mod_perl-2.0.0/ |
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