DISQUS

Yeah, I switched over to uTorrent a while back too, but I'm having trouble remembering all the reasons why. I think I came across it because I was looking for speed tweaks, and found several sources that said you can get the most out of uTorrent.

Seems like they were right, because just tonight, I broke the 1000kB/s mark downloading a Linux distro. It was around 950 for most of the download, but still, that's pretty decent.

Of course, speed will not be a factor if you're going to go through a proxy network, since that overhead will certainly slow things down, but if your ISP is capping torrent traffic anyway it might not be too bad of a drop off in speed if you move to an uncapped proxy network (assuming your ISPs and others in the chain aren't also capping Tor traffic).

There is a bit of a debate as to whether using networks like Tor for torrent downloads is "abusing" the networks, since the added traffic will make it slower for everyone else just trying to anonymize themselves, which is the primary purpose of most of those networks (at least Tor).

I haven't tried torrenting through Tor, just because I don't really download anything too questionable (no movies, etc.), and so I'm more interested in the highest speed I can achieve.

On a side note, if you are using an ISP that caps torrent traffic, I'd urge you to write to them and oppose their policy, pointing out that bittorrent is a legitimate way of efficiently distributing large files, and just because some people abuse it doesn't mean that they should discriminate against all traffic of that nature. Of course, this will probably do no good, and I don't expect anyone to actually do it, which is probably why net neutrality (and the internet as we know it today) will eventually be lost (at least in the US). Enjoy it while it lasts.

Speaking of Alan Moore, he's going to be in an upcoming Simpsons episode, making a (rare) personal appearance at the new "cool" comic shop in town (competing with Comic Book Guy's shop).

I prefer this one. :)

Yeah, that is jacked.

Powerpoint (or the equivalent) will be interesting, since there are some things you just can't do with a pure web app yet. If they were to come up with one, a mashup I might try would be a wrapper app (no this isn't a joke, since there would actually be a point to it) that would allow the show to be displayed on an alternate monitor but still have a control UI on the primary monitor. This is something I don't think they could do just with browser technology alone.

As for a database type app, I don't see Google Base as being in that category, since I think it's more about just publishing content, not necessarily serving the same purpose as database applications. I don't see them going after the larger, full featured web DB system, since there are already so many large competitors out there in the market, almost all of which require some level of customization to be used on a large scale.

They could go after the basic small DB market (currently served by the likes of Access, etc.), but then again, you could argue that that's kind of what things like Ruby On Rails are already going after: simple, quick DB apps with an easy UI on top. Google could possibly wrap up this kind of thing and abstract away all the remaining tech details (building a data model, etc.) behind a nicer setup UI, and probably just make the UI configuration generic and functional enough to work with 80-85% of the users. I'm sure there are probably other players going after something like this as well, but I'm not aware of any major ones that Google wouldn't trounce if they did something like this.

Since this is a sales related conference, did anyone ask him about that whole pre-invasion, WMD sales pitch to the UN about Iraq? :)

Yeah, I really wanted to see this one from the first time I saw the previews. I didn't know it was going to be out this soon, but maybe I just heard about it late.

Whoa, you can say that again. I just saw it.

Very funny; I wasn't trying to start a contest or anything. As of now, I don't think you've been reindexed yet, because I'm not seeing you. I'm currently at 15 for "dasani water" and 37 for "dasani", but I'm pretty sure yours will be higher once it gets in, since you have a higher page rank.

I guess if I really wanted to bump mine up more I could start digging all my own tech posts. :0

Yeah, I am really liking it too. The keyboard shortcuts are really good, which I guess they've had for a while, but the original UI was just not good enough to use so I didn't spend much time with it.

I haven't switched over yet, but I may. How is the feed update time so far for you?

Best practices in this regard are probably widely debated, but I think one thing that most people can agree upon is that a "production" web server (meaning something that you depend on to run your business) should be locked down as tightly as possible.

For me, this means a few things as it relates to this particular discussion:

1. Never run any services on your server that are not essential to the production purpose of that server. This would include things like Samba, in all instances I can think of.

2. Closely related to the previous point is that in a corporate environment, your internal people should be firewalled off from accessing your web server just as external people are. The common term for this is a DMZ. A basic summary of this (for those who don't know) is that your server should be on a network that is protected both from internal and external access. There should be a firewall on the public facing side that blocks all traffic except that which is desired from the public internet, and there should also a firewall on the internal side that is as tightly controlled as possible, only allowing people who really need to admin the box to have access (via SSH is probably the only port that you should need open from the internal side).

3. All changes not made by you (the administrator of the server) should be made on a development server that is a separate machine, set up to mirror the configuration of your production server. Then you can open up permissions on that server a little looser and allow whoever needs to edit files to do so, and then have the person or people responsible for the production server migrate those changes onto it. Ideally, you'd actually have an intermediate server in the mix as well, where the changes are made on the dev server, packaged up, and deployed to a test server (which is an exact duplicate of the production system). Then you can use that test server to validate that the package you just added is good, and only then do you add that "known good" change/package to the production server.

That may be more detail than you were looking for, but oh well. Subversion is a good approach as well, since that would allow you to better manage how the files are changed, since they can be checked out/in from local workstations as well as the development server, etc. so you wouldn't have to worry about configuring special access there. You could even just give them a script that they can run on the dev server to sync it up with the subversion repository, and just have them make all their changes through subversion (checked out and in from their workstations), so everyone would only need access on the dev box to run that one script.

Did that crash happen on your Mac? :)

I almost wish they hadn't done that. The numbers are no big deal, but the population control thing might have been too much to reveal outside of the actual show.

Of course, that's assuming that what's happening on the island is in any way still related to this, which it may not be, and this could just be a form of a red herring. We still have no idea whether the "others" we've seen are in any way related to this project. Although it's likely that they are somehow, we still don't know whether they were either knowing or unknowing participants or just the subjects of some kind part of the experiments that were somehow related, and furthermore we don't know whether even if they were affiliated with this project in the past whether they still are now, or whether they are rebels that turned against the foundation.

I'm guessing will see those kinds of twists and turns more and more, since it would seem uncharacteristic to reveal anything too obvious at this stage of the game.

What's going on with underwaterhatch.com right now? Looks like it's down.

Re: the iTV - They'll probably build it to only play Apple protected content that you buy from the iTunes video store...

When do you want to start this up (if you still want to)? I'd be up for it after common meals on Wednesdays, if that isn't too late for everyone else.

I've seen this floating around, and it's probably even more nerdy for me to say this, but the shirt isn't even really accurate, so it kind of makes the joke not as funny for me.

Instead of "What? Make it yourself.", the initial reply should be "You aren't allowed to ask for a sandwich" or just "no", because if he's requesting something he can't do without sudo, he doesn't have the option to do it himself.

Well, at least it's nice that he admits that the intel was wrong, although he always immediately follows up with a misleading remark about past actions that would serve to confirm his suspicions, even after he just acknowledged that they were wrong.

He (and other administration officials) do the same thing with the Iraq-Al Queda connection issue; they reluctantly acknowledge that it isn't there, but then go on at length about all the connections that they DO think are there, in an effort to preserve that perception even after it has been proven incorrect.

It's also nice to see him admit to what many of his critics had been suggesting for a while: that they had already determined to go into Iraq, and it really didn't matter what the intel showed.

NOOOOOOOOO!!!! :)

But seriously, yes, you should redo this in CSS. That page could be done using well marked up XHTML + CSS in like a third or fourth of the code.

I'd be into watching the extras from both 1 and 2.

I should add that one reason they provide the option of doing it via the registry (in addition to doing it via the admin GUI) is that it makes it easier if you're managing multiple machines, because then you can write a script or use centralized policy management to apply the same setting to multiple systems without logging into each of them individually.

Is this a special installation of SQL Server? Every time I've ever installed that it asks you whether you want to use integrated auth, SQL Server auth, or mixed as part of the install process. You can also change this setting (post-install) using the management application (as described by this article).

All that being said, SQL Server auth is not as secure as integrated auth (which is why it defaults to not enabling it), so it's probably a good idea to avoid using it unless you have to for some reason.

Whew, for a minute there I thought this was just going to be a gCal-ish buttonless browser mod that just went to the ebay site.

Hey, maybe I should make that... I could call it iBay.

That is pretty cool.

I don't think the Windows media DRM is in any worse shape than protected AAC (or whatever Apple calls theirs). In the event that they are cracked (which they all eventually are) anyone would have to publish updates to all the players. Sure, Apple has fewer models, but they have so many actual players out there, it would still be a nightmare.

Any company (including Apple) would probably do the same thing: start using a new protection method and tell users that if they want to listen to songs protected using the new technique they will have to download a firmware upgrade. I don't think this is any more difficult for either DRM provider. It may be hard for the smaller companies producing players to publish firmware upgrades quickly, but most of the WMA players out there are (at least in any significant quantity) are from companies who can probably respond pretty quickly to that type of thing.

What's up with the "Too low to display" thing? That always bugs me. Is that something you set or they have some kind of formula for?

The other thing you could do is not show ads for registered users.