A Little Off

I can’t even begin to describe how annoying it is to download a torrent and to discover that the person that compiled it added a bunch of trackers to it but didn’t bother to take into consideration that not all torrent clients (at least one) handle multi-trackers properly if you don’t put blank lines in between each tracker.

Like so:

Now I know for a fact that μtorrent requires this but I’m not sure about any other torrent clients. But the above list of trackers won’t work properly. In fact only the http based trackers will register because of the blank line. For all of the trackers to be used each tracker must have a blank line following it.

Like so:

So please if you’re going to post create a multi-tracker torrent at least list all of the trackers properly because it will only do any good if every peer in the swarm has all of the trackers listed in the torrent. Unfortunately most people treat bittorrent like a “set and forget” sort of file sharing protocol but if you setup one small part like that wrong everyone suffers and most people simply won’t notice.

It looks like Comcast is starting to roll out a data usage meter to customers in the Portland, OR area so they can gauge how far along they are in their 250GB per year limit. According to Gizmodo, Comcast says their median data usage is 2-4GB per month. I thought this was hilarious so I decided to do a little calculating of my own.

I’ve got a Linksys WRT-something-or-other router which I’ve installed DD-WRT on. Recent versions of the firmware have a section that keeps track of overall traffic through WAN that your router handles. It also makes it pretty easy to do a little calculation of your own with it since you can download the data in text format. It logs in terms of total data in and out per day of each month. November was my first full month of data excluding the the first of the month (something broke that day I guess), so I downloaded the log and looked at November’s data.

On average we downloaded 1917MB per day and uploaded 562MB per day. This is the total traffic between 3 people. Grand total we downloaded 54GB and uploaded 16GB. If we take a look at the ratio between the two I can approximate what our actual bandwidth is. We’re supposed to have a 20Mb down connection and the ratio suggests that our up bandwidth is ~5.86Mb which means our maximum upload rate is 750KB/s which we’ve never achieved before. When I use bittorrent to download Linux ISO’s I assume that in order to not choke our router with ACK’s I need to throttle the upload rate to about 70% of the maximum which hovers around about 120-130KB/s which is ~1Mb/s even and that’s only 70% of the max.

Basically I wouldn’t survive if I had Comcast and a 250GB limit per year.

This last Wednesday (Venteran’s Day) several friends and I went out to our local shooting range the Tucson Rifle Club and brought along a few new shooters. My brother was kind enough to lend me his Ruger MkIII Hunter to shoot since I had never done any shooting with it before. As it turns out the particular barrel he’s using on it is threaded to accept a suppressor. My friend Pete was kind enough to allow me to try his Gemtech Outback II suppressor on it and boy does it work great. Since the suppressor puts it well within safe hearing levels this is quite possibly the most fun firearm I’ve ever done target shooting with. Not to mention it looks absolutely ridiculous.

Sorry I’ve been pretty swamped with school and things. Hopefully over winter break I’ll feel the urge to write again.

Look no further than this photo.

Epiphye Corp.’s business plan is about an inch thick, neither fat nor skinny as these things go. The interior pages are slickly and groovily desktop-published out of Avi’s laptop. The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically gifted, Spandex-sheathed Left Coast travel bores. An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross.

That is probably the most epic description of anything I’ve ever read.

I have a couple of friends that either have already served in the military or are currently serving. And I’ve noticed one thing in a book I’m reading¹ that seems to be pretty close to what my friends have confirmed.

Guys and gals from his high school keep com­ing round to vis­it, and Bob­by soon learns the trick that his fa­ther and his un­cles and grandun­cles all knew, which is that you nev­er talk about the specifics of what hap­pened over there. No one wants to hear about how you dug half of your bud­dy’s mo­lars out of your leg with the point of a bay­onet. All of these kids seem like id­iots and lightweights to him now. The on­ly per­son he can stand to be around is his great-​grand­fa­ther Shaftoe, nine­ty-​four years of age and sharp as a tack, who was there at Pe­ters­burg when Burn­side blew a huge hole in the Con­fed­er­ate lines with buried ex­plo­sives and sent his men rush­ing in­to the crater where they got slaugh­tered. He nev­er talks about it, of course, just as Bob­by Shaftoe nev­er talks about the lizard.

While this quote isn’t exactly accurate it does have parts of the truth.

My friends rarely ever talk about what they did or saw when they served and for a good reason too. Typically it’s because there’s no way we can relate to their experiences and the story or feelings are completely lost on us. Only once did a friend share a story and it was after a somewhat traumatic experience, so it wasn’t exactly normal circumstances for him to decide to tell us about it. So next time you see someone who served, thank them and respect them enough not to pry a war story out of them.

1. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson [↩]

So I was sitting in my discrete structures analysis class today when a student asked a question about the homework. It went a little like this:

Student: How should we format pseudo-code in the homework?
Professor: Ah see pseudo-code is in that grey area. It’s somewhere in between code and english.
Professor: You see me do it one way in class, the book does it another way and the homework assignment does it an even different way.
Professor: Think of it this way, pseudo-code is a lot like pornography: you’ll know it when you see it.
Professor: So I’m not very worried about how you do your pseudo-code as long as I understand it.

The other cool thing that happened today was that I found out the owner of my favorite coffee shop is a pro-gun person. Apparently some of his relatives own a gun shop and he’s done some shooting competitions. All very cool. It definitely explains why none of the employees ever freak out about me carrying my 1911 which looks giant on my hip compared to others. I’m a tall skinny guy if you didn’t already know.

I think I may have found my new favorite professor. After having 3 lectures total with him I’ve noticed that he rates cleverness of his proofs//examples in terms of how many beers you could win by betting others at a pub on the outcomes.