grack.com

Mental note: FreeTextBox looks really cool.  This would be a great addition to TWiki.

If you haven’t seen Dead Like Me yet, try and find it.  Good stuff.

I posted the analysis from earlier to the Bittorrent development mailing list. I received a reply from Bram Cohen illustrating one flaw in the argument:

You make the assumption that the probabilities of different clients having a given block are decorrelated, which is wrong. That’s the point of rarest first, it makes it so that if one peer doesn’t have something it’s more likely that another peer will.

grack.com has moved to a new provider.  Thanks to 1&1 hosting, I’ve got 500 MB of webspace for the next three years - free!  It’s got a nice control panel interface, SSH and FTP access.  You can see more details about this package here.

For a while I’ve been wondering if a hybrid Bittorrent/Reed-Solomon system would be a more effective swarming download system. 

Just to make this clear ahead of time, I don’t believe the benefits of the Bittorrent/Reed-Solomon system would kick in until the torrent had been running for a longer amount of time.  The reason for this is that Bittorrent has a built-in “rarest first” algorithm (described in this Bittorrent paper).  The obvious goal the “rarest first” algorithm to replicate the rarest pieces of the system first, while leaving the most common pieces - the ones most likely to be around longer - until the end.