Traditional downloading and beyond torrents

My wife refered to downloading using peer 2 peer networks like kazaa and winmx as traditional downloading in a conversation about Shareaza and bit torrent. I personally think the term Traditional downloading is so funny for all the right reasons, and it should on wordspy under networking or communications. Honestly I can not even start to explain why its funny.

Anyway in other thoughts, I've been looking around for new torrent sites since two of the best have gone offline. Suprnova and Torrentbits went offline at the same time during last week, which has something to do with the raids by the MPAA? Anyway things have moved on and there will be an announcement by suprnova tomorrow at 9pm GMT. I personally think its something to do with Exeem. I mean even the unofficial faq has this flashing lights.

When will SuprNova.org be back?
Never as it was. If it eventually does come back up, it won't feature ANY links to torrents at all.

However theres no mention of Exeem here, and I have yet to listen to the Novastream mp3 which is still sitting on my ipaq after days. But theres tons more links here and theres even screen shots of the beta here. By the way just incase you not read it yet, stop reading and check out the wired interview with Bram Cohen.

On the Torrentbits side of things – theres already movement around a torrentbits2 site but were all too late already… Anyway here's a few sites I've checked out and like so far…
http://www.tvtorrents.tv , http://torrentspy.com , http://torrentreactor.net , http://elitetorrents.org , http://lokitorrent.com and couple more. This list will get you started. I've also found RSS and IRC very useful during this time of unrest in the torrent world. Looking past Bit torrent, there are already people building systems which work in the same way as bit torrent but keep everyones ip hidden. My favourate p2p technology has to be PDTP which looks pretty much like bittorrent but with added bonuses. I mean a piece proxy is a novel concept in its self, I just hope there more protected than trackers in a traditional bit torrent network. Also on the plus side, lets not forget Freenet and darktorrent. As the Engadget guys said today, there are people working on better and faster ways to get information around and Hollywood will not be able to stop them.

Cluetrain #57. Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner

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Blogdigger groups World Service feeds

BBC World Service RSS 1.0 feeds grouped together in Blogdigger.

Its quite something to see all the rss 1.0 feeds in one go. Its quite something to search through them in one go too. Up untill now, I've been using rssowl newsreader to search though so many feeds, but this is something else. Here's a couple of searches I've tried already.
A search for IBM brings up a Turkish and Vietnamese story. Of course a search for Bush brings back a load of juicy results. However blogdigger does not seem to do other languages very well for example Americk� spolecnost is turned into this – Americká společnost which obviously matches nothing. and thats only czech. I thought I'd give my favourate language service a go too. a search for CMS.NET finds the correct story, however in the same story �ng Fraser returns nothing and changes the characters to �?ng Fraser. Bit of a shame, but I'm sure it will change in time.

I thought I'd check a couple of other aggregators and syndic8 and it seems the feeds are being polled. With closer inspection it seems syndic8 doesnt like the feeds alot. No metadata? Whats a company to do? Anyhow this kind of information is useful for thinking about what should happen next.

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Podcasting with only PocketRSS 2.0

The thing everyone wants to know, does it work? Well I'm glad to say yes it does! This follows on from my post a little while ago when I explained that I am a beta tester for the excellent PocketRSS 2.0. I was able to download Dave Slusher the evil genius chronicles – introduction and disclaimer mp3 file. I did however pick the wrong feed and got 4 extra files which were a couple kilobytes big, which I later identified as torrent files. So obviously bittorrent on the pocketRSS 2.0 is out the question for now (at least – kidding). Tomorrow I will try with the Engadget podcast along with others. But generally it worked well and quick over my wifi connection straight on to the SD card I have. You can set it to anywhere which is great. But theres one thing which needs a little fixing. The file name can not be some random number, it needs to be whatever the enclosure tag specified otherwise your going to run into trouble later down the road. At this moment it uses a random number with rss on the front and .mp3 like this – rss012345678.mp3. This will cause trouble when loading lots of them and also when people start enclosures with pictures and videos. It took me a while looking at the raw xml to work out the other small mp3 files were actually torrent files not mp3s. I'm sure the great guys at happy jack will sort it out. Oh by the way I saw this on http://www.pocketcasting.com.

We're currently testing a piece of software that is in the “Alfa” stage of development for Pocket PC's that will download RSS 2.0 feeds and enclosures directly onto your device. I'm currently using it on my device and plan to post an article (with screen shots) in the next few days

If your are interested in testing this software email us. The developer is looking for testers and will send you a developers invite to download the software.

Not sure if its the Happyjack guys or someone else, but it looks like the pocketcasting scene is heating up very quickly! Can I also just say pocketrss 2.0 isnt just the only podcasting client for pocketpc at the moment it seem, but its the best RSS reader… Hey it even has advanced features my desktop rss reader doesnt have like the ability to read a opml file from the web and reload it at any time. Its well worth the money, and i'm not just saying that.

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When its set to busy, i am honestly busy…

Ok so first up Tom Coats talks about the weird context shift of IM on mobile devices. and then Ben Hammersley replys with this. And I see what there saying, actually worst than that. I've actually been trying to deal with mobile IM for the last few months. See GPRS charges are getting low enough to be online in between work and home, so I am. However theres things which just dont work, for example.

Usually when I'm iming, I usually have to tell people i'm on my smartphone or ipaq otherwise they wonder why i'm taking so long to reply. Theres also a tendancy to write large chunks rather than tap tap bang tap tap bang, as im conversations up the screen tend to be a pain to scroll when trying to type at the same time. So I end up coming across really busy and distracted, when i'm actually just sitting on a train listening to podcasts. Saying all that, the opposite is also true. Specially when I'm on IM using my ipaq. I tend to turn off the screen and leave the ipaq on to walk, which means I'm on online but actually very busy or not able to talk right now. And just before I consider ways to solve this problem, one of the tricky problems is leaving im on while at a resturant or cafe. Its not as discreet as sms and a real pain in the ass for the other person trying to get hold of you, thinking your at your desk. At least with sms people expect you may not reply instantly. Its a social convention, for me at least…

Ok I'm sure i've been through this before, I use to think it was about presence management. But its not possible to do so without somekind of technological assistance. For example my smartphone has a nice profile called Automatic which automaticly sliences when your synced calendar says you have a busy meeting. Its simple and works. However i dont sync my phone nearly as much as I use to now I've switched to linux. Which leads me to wonder why my ipaq (which I do sync everyday) doesnt have a option like this?

Off the back of the last question, is it possible for the ipaq to send out a bluetooth message to all bonded devices to say Ian is now busy in a meeting? I know it wouldnt work for everyone because not everyone keeps there calendar up to date. But I bet you would if your mobile devices did something like that. I mean it cant be that hard to write something which switches profiles based on a bluetooth message? Saying that, with all the bluesnarfing attacks and closed api's on the windows mobile platform. It isnt going to work is it? Ok so lets forget bluetooth for a moment then. To get on im you need to be online, so why not some service which defaults your im client into a certain presence depending on your ical calendar? Hummm maybe… nahh…

Ben talks about the fact he's not usually online because people dont respect his presence. Well I'm using PSI which doesnt automaticly pop up a window, thank goodness. And I tend to have the same view of IM as I do for sms. Aka leave it till i'm ready to deal with it. I've been thinking how great it would be to tell if someone is really idle by the client following movement on the screen or something, but thats even more scary that anything else I've suggested. I've also been thinking about somekind of in-between solution. For example, I've got a bot called WeatherBot which tells me all the information I need without actually iming it. Maybe theres something in this? I've looked on the other networks and jabber seems to be the only one which does this, however theres lots of news about msn messeger 7 which is meant to copy yahoo's attention Buzz thing. Personally this is still too much, but shows theres grounds inbetween which can be explored. Oh by the way interesing blog about Jabber and Bots. I think maybe a jabber bot which is a conversation summariser would be difficult but damm useful. Thanks for the idea Miles (we were talking about something on top of aggregation for news).

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Firefox’s RSS auto discovery needs fixing

Just been putting OPML subscriptions into some of the BBC world service sites using auto discovery. Theres a really nasty thing firefox does with autodiscovery which was unexpected. It seems to search for all link rel's with RSS or ATOM in the title attribute. This is fine except when you try to put something like RSS subscription list as a title attribute for a opml file. Then Firefox tries to load it in as a live bookmark, which when I first tried it, I thought was very cool. But of course it breaks. After some googling looks like no one else has hit this issue before. So here it is for all to see. By the way, OPML is now available in beta form for the 35 rss 1.0 languages we do now. It works like this – http://www.bbc.co.uk/ [language service] / rssnewsfeed.opml. For example – http://www.bbc.co.uk/czech/rssnewsfeed.opml. You should start to see auto discovery link elements for them coming over the next few days, and I hope to clean up the default exported opml files with more information in the near future.

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Podcasting in xbmc using python scripts

Ok another post to the xbmc forums, this time for podcasting on the xbox media centre.

How come no one it seems has picked up on podcasting for xbmc? If you do not know what podcasting is please read this wikipedia defination – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting. The basic idea is, that a RSS feed has an enclosure element which points to a location where to download media (typically a Mpeg3 or Torrent file). There are already 100's of podcasts from radio stations to homebrew broadcasters. But theres no douht that its a great resource of media and video wont be that far behind in the near future.

Usually a little program like ipodder or doppler reads the RSS feeds every few hours and collects the content from the enclosure element when it comes across one. I can imagine this being very easy to do as a python script in xbmc, maybe as a background task while you watch films or listen to music not from the internet. Actually I believe ipodder is actually written in python already!!! I've already seen two python scripts which can do pretty much what i've said they just need to be put together. YaRSSr.py and download apleasure_zip.py. Its just a shame i'm not a python programmer…

Seriously if I had the time, I would hack it together myself, I've looked at the source python scripts which I mentioned and I think its possible even for me. Right now I have ipodder running on a machine which dumps all the podcasts media into a shared directory which the xbox reads when loading up, then I'm using the script startplaylist.py to automaticly play a the engadget and daily source code podcasts. Not ideal because I have to add them to the playlist myself, hence why I turned it off and just navigate to the podcats share now. Anyway I hope so one picks up on the idea and takes it somewhere I wasnt even thinking.

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Listening to podcasts without a host machine

Off the back of the engadget how-to where pureblue wrote this in the comments

Are there any podcast clients out there for the Windows Mobile or Windows Pocket PC devices? It would be handy to leave my iPaq on when connected to WiFi and it copies over my subscribed feeds in the background. This would cut my desktop computer out of the loop, meaning I'm not reliant on having to go home and sync up to get content. It would also be good when I'm listening to a Podcast that mentions another feed to be able to subscribe, rather that jot down the address and remember to subscribe when I get home.

PocketRSS 2.0 screenshot

Fear not, its coming soon. I've been beta testing a great new application called PocketRSS. The current version 1.42 doesnt support podcasting but is the best RSS reader for pocketPC out there at the moment. However the beta's of version 2.0 do support podcasting directly on the device, removing the need to have a host machine at all. Happyjackroad, say there going to be launching version 2.0 soon enough, and I would say the beta i'm using is more like a Preview release than beta. Seriously version 2.0 is great and can be totally operated one handed while taking a very busy train into work every morning. I want to also point out that it has many simple features which other mobile RSS readers dont. Like the ability to copy and paste text, see the url of the link and handle over 100+ subscriptions without crashing and burning. Well worth the 10 pounds I spent on it (who says I never pay for software?).

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No, you can not have it all…

I was listening to Barry Schwartz's Less is more presentation at poptech today on the train in to work. Oh my goodness this is great listening. And honestly sums up alot of what I've been thinking recently.

The [clip] idea of closing some doors to walk through others is a nightmare that I have alot. And dont even go there about working [clip]. Theres so much to do and I keep getting new ideas and projects to consider working on. And all while trying to balance equally or more important parts of my life. I would hate to be a mono person because theres so much to learn and be engergised by. But if the massive amount of choice is doing more damage than good, maybe I need to strike even more balance.

But lets not get too far ahead of ourselves here, some choice is good. Just not 500 ice cream's worth of choices. I learned recently that everything made in nature is made of 92 different types of atoms only. Yep from Whales to Humans to a single ant, all the same 92 atoms. And it gets better than that, the same 92 atoms are used across the whole universe. Whats this got to do with choice and having it all? well in constraints comes creativity and innovation. Stewart Butterfield did a great presentation along time ago explaining the almost endless possiblies there are in 5k. If that is mindboggling alone, over choice is a pain in the ass and does make for a difficult life.

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Tis the season for drinking… let it be over please!

This is a difficult thing to put across. I dont know what it is about myself but I really dislike drunk people, please dont take offense everyone! Let me at least try and explain.

From a early age I've always been a clubbing/raving person. I actually disliked pubs, and when I mean pubs I mean the real old english style pubs with brown wall paper, smoking stains and no music except a dodgy old jukebox attached to a wall. I'm sorry but I would rather spend a night in Easyeverything. However a good bar isn't as bad but its the people which I still dont like. Dont get any funny ideas about me being scared of drunk people. I just get into this mood of feeling sorry for people who are drunk, like there lives are so sorry that they need to drink to the point of forgetting what actually happened that night. I know its not like that, but my from my view – I wouldn't go out and get so pissed that I forget bits of what happened that night. Once again i'm only analysing my own thoughts not passing judgement on anyone.

I remember when I was young (like 13-15) buying drinks for friends and friends of friends. Yes its against the law but I was young and looked like 18 or even 21. (Some would even say acted like it a bit) anyhow we would spend time in the field drinking cheap booze and laughing about silly stuff while trying to get it going with girls from other schools (we honestly thought all girls from speedwell were so umm, similar in nature). Anyway, all i'm saying is things have not changed much from those days… Maybe I had not thought this out enough, but I was thinking the older you get the less, getting legless and would be appealing. Actually come to think about it, what is it about getting off your face which is fun or worth doing over and over again?

Ok backpedling or digging myself a even more deeper hole. I actually do drink but I dont drink any kind of Beer, Stout, Ale, etc. I do however like a nice red wine while eating and anything with vodka when out for the night. Which would include all those alcopops, yumm yumm. But seriously, I drink very slowly and take it easy. It also helps that Vodka doesnt have much of an effect on me, so I will never have a hangover or throw up because of it alone – specially when mixed with something soft. Anyway where was I going with all this? Oh yes – you can hardly tell when i'm drunk because I dont become this nasty staggering not making sense temporary burden to other people which other people can be.

Anyhow, I hope this has all made some sense, and i'm not pointing at anyone or any groups, just generally saying I hate the anti-social mentality of drunks and honestly if push came to shove. Like the anti-smoking debate I wouldnt never ban drinking it wouldnt make any sense to do so. But the idea of seperate places is appealing to me at least. I would rather go to a cafe or a juice bar where it wont be filled with drunks falling over each other. Ok enough, i'm sure people will either hate me, be worried to talk to me or think i'm really nasty for saying what I said. But seriously if you've read this and have a comment please write it on the blog, email me or even stop and talk to me about it. Dont feel like i'm talking about you… because trust me i'm actually not.

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Re-design of the garden

Just recently I've been thinking of changing the design of cubicgarden.com. The design your use to has gone throught many tweaks but the main thrust was at a time when blojsom's default template had tables still. Looking Asual for example the default template actually looks and feels better than mine. So I'm going to use it as a base and tweak on top of that. So if you notice things changing each time you refresh, you now know why…

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xbmc has support for the digital audio access protocal?

Selecting the itunes on xbmc

Yes so recently I upgraded my xbox media centre to a november cvs version and found some interesting new features. The biggest change comes in the way of apple itunes support. Using the daap which is used by itunes 4.x, xbmc is able to not only play everything in the library but also all the different playlists. Which I have to say is pretty awesome and has prompted me into downloading itunes on to my tabletpc. If only winamp had support for this too, i would consider switching because itunes is a beast on cpu usage and does not have the plugin support like winamp. Anyway some more screen shots are here and here.

xlink kai client in xbmc

Some other interesting things have also been better intergrated and updated. The great xlink kai client has been updated so now you can type in a chat room using the onscreen keyboard or if your like me, you can use an usb adapter and a real keyboard. So pretty much now the xbmc xlink client is equal to the win32 client. You still need to run the kai engine on a pc or another device but hey you cant have it all.

shoutcast built into xbmc now

Like the daap:// protocal there is now a shoutcast:// protocal too which basiclly goes to shoutcast.com and cache's the top 500 shoutcast broadcasts. Another screenshot at 500. Shoutcast being intergrated into xbmc is great and I'm hoping to see more intergration with some of the new scripts poping up. Oh by the way its good to see someone else in the bloggerosphere is keeping up with xbmc. Oh by the way we play here

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Whats been going on recently at work?

Well if I tell you I may have to kill you… No but seriously, too much stuff to blog about. Anyway let me try and explain.

Monday I did a presentation with Paul on Podcasting for the World service, I used the meyer's S5 Xhtml format which worked really well up to the point when xmlspy converted my javascript import into a compact one.

From this < script src="myjs.js" >< /script > to this < script src="myjs.js" />

Which is right but Opera and IE 6 would not load the Javascript and so the presentation could only be shown on Firefox, which was fine as I was using the tabs to show different sites. I learn afterwards that the compact script element was the problem. Anyhow the presentation went well except a discussion about bandwidth costs and licencing issues. Which was to be expected I guess, but some people seemed unmoveable to even a trial with one programme. Paul's presentation consisted of reasons why the world service should provide content in downloadable form and was very well thought-out. I kinda of wish I could put it online with mine, a bit of transparency couldnt go a miss here. Theres also talk about presentating to language services and higher managers. I'm also on the side trying to get Adam Curry to give a talk about podcasting from a radio broadcaster point of view, but alas he's a very busy man.

Tuesday and Wednesday were normal day pretty much except I recieved a very late email from Creative R&D outlining a project which I could be involved in next year. Details are a secret of course and still being worked out. Oh my, How on earth could I forget about the BBC Shake up on Tuesday?!
Ok first up, friends and people reading these are my thoughts and my thoughts alone (do not read into them as leaked BBC infomation). I am effected by the changes but not to the extent of moving to Manchester in 5 years. There will be cut backs but unlikely to be job losses.

The World Service, too, will be asked to make significant savings, said Mr Thompson, through investment, efficiency and reprioritisation as part of a separate review. But, he added, the World Service was not subject to the 15% cuts being applied to other departments.

So generally we will need to think and develop in more effective ways which provide the same benefit but using less resources. Now personally I think the whole announcement was quite strong sign in my eyes that the BBC must not only keep up but lead using the innovations of technology. Maybe this is where I could talk about BBC Backstage and innovations like the creative archive but no need as its been blogged else where. Anyway my final thought on the shakeup are… Moving out to Manchester is a brave move and a good one I think, too long have we treated anything past birmmingham as another country. The cuts are quite steep but the BBC can work towards those figures, without hurting programming specially if we stop copying successful content like bigbrother. Anyway I've said my bit and you can read lots of comments from others here

Thursday was a very early start, as I had to fly to Glasgow on Easyjet to meet the people of BBC Scotland interactive. Which created the system for Island blogging. Let me first start by saying how wonderful and open these people are. I mean wow, it such a difference from the usual London meetings which tend to be a little edgy sometimes. Anyway, I'm sure its public knowledge that there going to extend the island blogging with a better backend system and consider rolling it out futher in to scotland. How? well thats to be decided still. I showed the scotblog team my blojsom world service test which sends out html as ssi includes instead of html, and it seemed to go down quite well. But most of discussion took place around taking apart what exactly is blogging and where should the BBC be in the blogosphere? All I can say is that we had a good friendly discussion and it was just a shame we had a flight leaving so early as we could have spent much time talking futher. By the way Glasgow was different from what I'd imagined and it seemed quite nice actually, need to go up there for a holiday sometime soon.

Friday was all about Paul's idea… which I shouldnt talk about too much and some would say why mention it at all? Well agreed, but some of the experiements I'll be doing in my own time will be related to the idea. For example I'm using Flock as a http caching proxy for webservices. The bookmarks you see now are from del.icio.us but via Flock which only makes requests every 30 – 60mins. It has a XSL backend so I can rewrite or add templates as need. I've also been checking out blogwave alot recently and considering another way to do the idea. Here's a clue, take RSS dump it upside down and got what the idea is…

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Google suggestion

google suggest beta

Tom sent a nice URL for the new google suggest beta and the technique for doing it. I've been aware of this for a while, but was shocked to learn Opera, Mozilla and Firefox will emulate the activeX object to get the same result. And it seems it would gracefully fail on browsers wiithout javascript. Excellent more proof that REST is nice and simple, if only google supported REST now.

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The first BBC World service RSS 1.0 page goes online

BBC Persian syndication image

I'm glad to announce the first BBC World service RSS page supporting RSS 1.0 is available on the BBC persian.com site. Others are following soon, but this is the outcome of lots of hard work within the World service new media team over the past few months. I'm very proud our audience will now beable to consume BBC World service content on muliple devices and when it suits them best.

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Its that time again… New phone time

Ok its that time of the year again, when I get like a text offer a day and phone calls offering me crap phones which I would not be seen dead with. Yep upgrade time. So far last month I recieved 5 text messages and 3 phone calls offering me crap. Best offer I got was for the Nokia 7610 which is bog standard and not worthy of a years useage at all. Told them to stick there offer, my SPV E200 is much better than that thing.

Sanyo's S750 3g phone

So what have I seen which takes my fancy? Well today I saw on engadget the new Sanyo S750 which is a 3G phone coming out to the orange network soon.
The Nokia 7710 looks interesting but honestly I wouldnt use it much as I got a nice pocketpc with wifi and mass storage now. The SonyEricsson S700i looks great but memory stick duo really puts me off it. Plus no EDGE or 3G? I mean come on, gonna have the phone for another year, GPRS aint going to cut it alone. But back to the Sanyo for a moment. Joey Geraci left a comment saying how it was stupid the small amount of memory it has. And I agree, except I already have 256 meg in my SPV and 512 in my ipaq, any of which can be swapped out.

So in the vain of last year, heres my list of features.
GSM tri-band (900, 1800, 1900MHz) with EDGE or UMTS would be great
High resolution screen at least 12bit colour
At least 1 megapixel with light, two would be excellent
Video download and streaming of 3gp and mpeg4 files
Photo and Video capture to 3gp, mpeg4 and jpg formats
SD or MMS memory card slot
MP3 and OGG player
Speaker phone support
Java MIDP2.0 support
Bluetooth, infrared and USB connectivity. Would never buy a phone without bluetooth nowadays, it must also support bluetooth dialup! Not just headset
Email (POP3 and IMAP4)
Symbian or Windows Mobile operating system

Bluetake BT420 Bluetooth Hi-Fi Sports Headphone
On another angle, anything I buy will have to work with these Bluetooth headphones, which I will buying myself for christmas. The only feature which seems to be missing is the abilty to pair to more than one device at one time. Say if I want to use the bluetooth audio gateway feature of the Ipaq with the bluetooth smartphone headset profile? Quick note to myself not to forget another 2.5mm jack for my SPV which I lost recently.

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