...more recent posts
Excellent new Crytpo-Gram from Bruce Schneier, including pieces on national ID cards, and a cost-benefit analysis of stealing an election (he's written extensively in the past about technical problems with electronic voting machines.)
Leaving tomorrow morning for a week in Miami. Lots of running around with my head cut off today trying to get ready. Will hopefully replace my SD storage card in my phone so that I can get the photolog working again.
Temperatures should be around 80. I haven't felt warm in so long!
Shtoom is a open-source, cross-platform VoIP softphone, implemented in Python. As well as the basic phone, the package also includes a number of other applications -Looks like their commercial application uses this in a package that combines blogging and VoIP for the corporate world. Wow, I'm trying to get my head around that.
- shtoom - the end-user phone
- shtam - a simple answering machine/voicemail application
- shmessage - an announcement server
Shtoom should work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It ships with user interfaces for Qt/KDE, Gtk/GNOME, Tk and a command line. There will hopefully be native user interfaces for Windows and the Mac soon, until then, the Tk interface works on those platforms.
I'm just hearing about Ecto now. It is a stand alone weblogging application. So instead of posting your blog through a tiny textarea box inside your browser, Ecto gives you a sort of word processing like program with a much richer set of formatting and spell check features. It also does image uploads, and can even crop and resize images. Looks like a pretty slick package. And lots of integration on OS X (it integrates with iPhoto for instance.) Here are some screen shots.
And now there is a Windows version as well.
I'll keep my eye on this, but I don't think it is something I would pay for. Neat idea though.
Nokia 6255. This is the phone I am recommending now (if you don't need an uber geek phone like the Treo600 or S/E P900.) This Nokia has everthing. Very nice.
Experimenting with Bit Torrent & RSS. I wish I could get it together to say more about this combination. Hopefully in the future. I think this might be big.
You can download the Bit Torrent client here (MacOS X and Windows) if you want to play around with it. Sort of like a P2P program, except you don't search for files. Instead, you have to have a link to a .torrent seed file. This seed file then allows you to connect to peers, and download the target file in chunks from many different people at once. As you download bits of the file, you are also uploading bits to other people.
So a server can seed a .torrent file of size x, and then n number of people can download it. But the server doesn't need x * n bandwidth, it only needs x * y where y is some very small number. Then the rest of the people downloading the file (n - y) will actually be downloading it from other people who are downloading it instead of from the original server. So the greater the number of people downloading at the same time (the larger n is) the *greater* the speed you will get (at no cost to the original server.) This is very good for large files that lots of people want at the same time. Perhaps it's the only way to do this.
But, like I said, you can't search for stuff through Bit Torrent. You have to already know the URL of a .torrent seed in order to get started. For instance, here is a web site listing television show .torrents. Just open one of those URLs in Bit Torrent and it will start downloading (be patient, it can take a few minutes to connect and start - but then it will be very fast once it starts.)
If that all makes sense, then the original link to the Bit Torrent + RSS stuff is just about making RSS feeds be able to contain .torrent links, and having the RSS feed reader automatically hand these links off to Bit Torrent. This way someone can publish a .torrent seed, say, in the middle of the night, your RSS reader would automatically get the link, and then automatically start the download. With this setup you could wake up every morning to hundreds of megs of fresh downloads, all without your intervention, just by subscribing to certain RSS channels. (Sounds a little like TV, no?)
Anyway, I'm rushing, and this is not a good summary, but there is something very interesting here. I'll try to come back with better examples.