A Day in Paradise

I played with Joost way back in January when it was still called “The Venice Project” and beta testers had to sign NDAs (although that didn’t stop a lot of them). Back then while the technology was great, due to the number of users the quality was mediocre.

I got into Joost again at Stella’s request, when she met someone at the library who wanted an invitation.

I installed joost this evening on my 2.4ghz/1gig Vista Home Basic which is connected to my 32″ LG LCD TV and acts as our “Media Center” and not only is the quality great but the selection has grown to include some real shows (currently watching LEXX).

For those of you who haven’t heard about Joost, it is created by the same people who brought us Skype and works using a peer-to-peer model. Peer-to-pear media streaming is drastically different from the server-based media streaming which we are seeing from various news sites, as well as sites like youtube.com. Before YouTube’s acquisition by Google, they announced that they were spending $1 million on bandwidth alone.

Through using Peer-to-peer technology Joost allows the its software to communicate with other copies of Joost software and distribute the media between themselves. Using traditional file serving each additional user viewing a file creates a larger burden on the server, using P2P each additional user becomes another server in the “swam” and shares that file with other peers the initial seed server load is lightened.

I had an interesting discussion with Stella about how the technology behind Joost would handle streaming live content. Because of the P2P nature of Joost, it would be fairly difficult to distribute truly live content without reverting back to the original server based media serving. That is assuming that Joost is only sending data to my computer which I request and am watching.

If my Joost client can receive data that I am not watching, it would allow the main Joost servers to ensure that all the shows that they are streaming can be delivered in real-time and equal quality and if Joost wants to deliver live events this would probably be the only way that this would be possible.

Anyway… I am VERY happy with the progress that Joost has made, and am looking forward to see how it will move forward.

Oh yeah, and the DRM issue isn’t an issue.

The article says:

The online site has found more than 29,000 registered sex offenders among its 180 million members, it was revealed on Tuesday. Three months ago the site acknowledged that there were 7,000 profiles of sex offenders on its site, but under pressure from legal officials in several US states it has provided a more complete breakdown of its membership.

…

MySpace’s head of security, Hemanshu Nigam, said: “We’re pleased that we’ve successfully identified and removed registered sex offenders from our site and hope that other social networking sites follow our lead.”

In other news 29,000 new accounts were opened with random fake names.

Nice move, MySpace.

1. I am going to start posting a LOT more onto Flickr. I have been trying to keep my photostream limited to a couple pictures for each occasion, but will move towards using sets and collections more for easy browsing.
2. I am not checking my firstname@lastname.com email address very frequently (fscking spammers), so if you send me anything msg me through skype or irc or something else so I can dig up your email.
3. I am on (and loving) facebook… link up with me there. I am developing a couple applications for the platform as well! Great stuff!

This blog entry is an extension of an IRC discussion and email conversation that took place regarding the #phpc channel on Freenode.

Back in “the day” #phpc consisted of between 5 and 10 people, and as IRC channels go it was only us in there for about 2 years. This resulted in everyone getting to know each other well. As time passed the community grew organically, we had the regulars and then people who drifted in and out either asking PHP questions or just coming in to chat for a bit.

In April 2005 Davey set up the #php.thinktank channel, and the additional attention add more regulars to #phpc. By the end of 2006 #phpc participants hovered around 50.

The interaction between #php.thinktank and #phpc was good and many of the same people lurked in both groups. #php.thinktank was designed for more technical discussion, and several organized discussions took place on various technical topics. #phpc on the other hand was simply a place to hang out amongst friends.

Sometime in the beginning of 2007 the community size started to grow quickly, however the number of active participants remained roughly the same. Basically the lurkers were growing, the channel is currently about to break 100 users.

This situation brings up some special concerns.

1. is it reasonable to expect that a public IRC channel can afford you any privacy.
2. does a community that was built around “just farting around” have the right to be exclusive when they think that too many people are involved?
3. is there any reasonable way to limit the number of lurkers?

Note that when I say lurkers, I just mean people who park themselves in an IRC channel and don’t contribute to the channel. People who contribute and then go dormant for weeks/months are a different story.

I have had an active account at backpackit for the last 2 years, I used it for a lot of different collaborative writing I was doing until Google Docs started kicking ass google style and I decided to move to that.

Now that I have several hundred documents in google docs, I am wondering how I can get my old stuff off of backpackit, and preferably into google docs. Backpackit advertises an XML exports, but it only gets a handful of titles and none of the several hundred articles that I have up there.

I found this, a bit crude but I guess it will do the trick.

.. every time you send an email…

not really, but pretty close…

http://bayimg.com/jadhAAABp
http://harrypotter7spoilers.blogspot.com/

What can I say, Leonardo does the South African accent so well he totally disappears as an actor. Between this movie and “The Departed” which I watched two days ago, my opinion of Di Caprio has totally changed. He has transcended (whatever that is supposed to mean).

Blood Diamond is set in Sierra Leone during the bloody civil war. A fisherman (Djimon Hounsou) finds a pink diamond, and a Diamond Smuggler has to travel with him to retrieve the hidden diamond and save the fisherman’s son.

This movie shows the brutality of the war. It shows the extreme cruelty of the rebels and plight of the child soldiers they recruit, it also shows the foreign army’s involvement in the search for diamonds, as well as the role in western cultures and the massive diamond selling companies.

As you watch this movie, you realize that while it is an amazing character study of all the characters involved, the focal point of the movie is the diamond. This is an expose on the diamond industry and exposes the tactics that they use to keep diamonds in demand and the price as high as it is. For more information about this read the article “Have you ever tried to sell a diamond” by Edward Jay Epstein. The article is over 20 years old, but a very interesting read.

I would give this movie an 8 out of 10. It is very well written and produced. Be warned that the movie is extremely violent, and has many disturbing scenes especially those involving the child soldiers.

Annie lost her first tooth today. She’s been playing with her “wiggle-tooth” for the last few weeks, and has been getting exceedingly anxious to get it out of her mouth.

Today, after my failed attempt to pull it, she disappeared for half an hour, and then re-appeared with a tooth in her hand!

Before

After

Now we are waiting to see what the tooth fairy is going to do about this.