Jon Åslund

Jag importerade just några gamla inlägg jag hade i min livejournal. Mitt första inlägg är helt plötsligt inte först längre. För att läsa dem, se kategorin Livejournal. Jag funderar på att även importera min Karlsruhe-dagbok och mina julkalendrar.

Superman is an asshole.

When I was young, there was a genre of games called platform games. The one I liked the most was called Great Giana Sisters, which was of course a big Super Mario Bros rip off. In most of the games you could stand at the end of a ledge with just the last pixel of your toe, and still not fall down. Some days ago I had a flashback of this when I saw a Pucko (Swedish milk chocolate drink) in a vending machine. You have probably been there yourself, you buy something, but it gets stuck and won’t fall down. The Pucko I saw however, was defying gravity, claiming “I am standing with at least one pixel on the ledge”. Maybe it was afraid it was going to be crushed because of the high fall.

I want to serve files with bittorrent, just as easily as I serve files with a web server. Just upload the files to a directory on a server somewhere. A torrent file is automatically generated after the file is completely uploaded to the directory, and a bittorrent client running on the server starts to seed the torrent.

There should be an easy way to browse the files, just like you can browse files in index lists of many web servers. Nothing fancy is needed, but could of course be built. When users wants to download a file, they will get the torrent file instead.

A tracker is not needed if everyone are using the latest bittorrent client (as of 4.1.0). You just need to point to your own client, and/or a routing client, like router.bittorrent.com. However, if you can run a bittorrent client on the same host that runs a web server, it is quite easy to setup a tracker as well. This will also be compatible with other bittorrent clients, and older versions of bittorrent.

Now comes my main point. Bandwidth is unfortunately expensive. You usually don’t want to serve big files like you normally serve with bittorrent on a host where you have a web server.

Therefore, there should be an option for your seeding client to be as conservative with bandwidth as possible, since most hosting companies have limits on bandwidth usage. This can be done by doing something similar to “superseeding”, when the server is the only one that has the complete torrent, where you try to never upload the same piece twice, unless it is needed, and stop seeding when the file is fully distributed among the other peers.

The conservative mode, does have some problems though. You can’t know for sure if a file is fully distributed or not. If someone wants to stop you from distributing a file, they would just have to start seeding that file, without actually giving out any pieces, or just giving out junk pieces. Then it would look like the file is fully distributed, even though it is not, and your seeding client in conservative mode would stop. Eventually, when enough good peers have left, the file is not distributed any longer and will never be available anymore. You could try to fix that by checking for distribution speed. If no peers are getting any new pieces, they will never report new pieces and then it would look like distribution has stopped, but this is easy to fake as well of course, so it would be a pretty pointless check.

What probably would be better is to hope peers are well behaved, serve at full speed when you are the only seed and slow down the more distributed it looks like a file gets.

A log of all the traffic should be made, so you could see which files you have seeded, how much of them, and how much in total of course. To be able to check at any moment what is currently being uploaded, how many peers are connected, etc. would of course also be interesting to see. Total amount (and their ip addresses) of peers connected to you maybe an interesting stat to log as well, but bandwidth per file and total is what is most important to me.

ilka died yesterday. I had her locked up in a closet. Friends tell me that was the reason; I didn’t give her enough air. ilka was one of my computers, named after a Miss Sweden pageant from 2001. Even though she seemed like an incredibly cool person, I seriously doubt that the real Ilka would feel honored.

It started with a few lost packets. Grrr, that stupid ISP, I thought. Before calling them, I checked the hardware. Don’t want to complain to tech support and feel like an idiot just because a network card had gone bad or something like that. I connected my laptop. No packet loss. It was when I tried to replace the network cable, to see if it was faulty, that I felt something weird. A tingling sensation, not unlike foot orgasm (eh, yeah, I should probably explain that later), but instead through the hand that was fumbling around the back, trying to pull out the cable. Electrical current. Not good. Although it took a while to realize how serious it was. I think I had a bath, a banana and read some blogs, before starting to panic and taking a new backup of important things. I came halfway through the backup before ilka died. No smoke or explosion with cool special effects, she just stopped.

I feared the worst, quickly mounted the hard drives in another computer, because I somehow felt I needed to hurry. No data lost. Yay! Not that I had anything terribly important, that wasn’t backed up elsewhere, but still it’s annoying. It is short term solution though. My desktop computer now has 4 hard drives, and is very noisy, especially with the addition of ilka’s older drives. The rest of ilka is now lying on the floor in pieces, totally silent and motionless.

I mentioned on irc today that I liked Canadians because they gave me Lexx and Charlie Jade. Then I had to explain who Charlie Jade was. I didn’t think of him as a nerd, but now I know.

<Jooon> I love canada. canadians gave me lexx and charlie jade
<boblet> I don’t know who charlie jade is
<boblet> is she both hot and single?
<Jooon> well, he is a bit steamy when it rains, so yeah, he is hot
<Jooon> he has a girlfriend though, in a parallell universe
<boblet> oh, like most nerds jooon

Here is a picture of him by the way.

Brushing his teeth, while on the videophone (yep, geek).

I have now been awake for roughly 34 hours. My body is tired, but I am not really sleepy. I was sleepy this morning, but it went away after a few hours, after taking that bath, and eating a bit, maybe around 14, just as it normally does, when I have slept the night before. I am not sure why I have been awake this long today, although it’s hard to call it today, when you cross over days like this.

The longest I have been awake was some years ago, when me and my friend Kalle planned a nightly stay at school to finish a lab assignments. I woke up quite late that Thursday, came to school, worked during the night. We had our presentation during the next day. Was about to go home, but instead ended up at a party, where I stayed up the entire night. Then for some reason, I had entered some kind of phase, so I wasn’t that sleepy either when I came home, and I stayed awake during much of Saturday. About 48 hours. I don’t plan to beat it.

I was about to enter my bath, waiting for the water to fill up, when I began thinking on how to take a bath while surfing the net. That’s when I realized that I might be a bit too attached to the computer…. Got to hurry. Water is filling up. Had to write this first though.

I have been complaining that there is no place in Stockholm that serves good noodles. I was wrong. One of my favorite sushi restaurants, Izumi Gai, has great udon.

morfeusz mentioned the problem of taking pictures of people you don’t know.

I see people almost every day that I want to take a picture of. Most of the time, I don’t have the camera with me, so I can’t do anything about it. Other times, I can’t get my camera unpacked and up in shooting mode fast enough, before they leave. There also the times when the light is so bad that I couldn’t a good picture anyway, which would ruin the whole thing.

The most annoying moments are however, when you have all the time in the world, the subject is being very still, in perfect light, and all you would have to do is snap the picture. I don’t want to just take a picture, because they are likely to notice me and would perhaps be bothered. Sometimes I do, but mostly it’s when I am taking a picture of something and they are in the line of fire. In Greece I found it pretty easy to really point at people, making a tourist excuse to myself, especially if I was quick about it, just walking by and also taking lots of pictures of everything else. I also usually don’t dare to ask people if I can their picture. When I do, they all ask if I work as a photographer and if the photo is going to be in a paper. It is most likely because my camera looks very professional.

Late last Saturday I was at the airport in Chania, going home. All the flights were late, I was getting tired and people started to sink down in their chairs, those that had chairs, others were sitting/lying on the floor leaned against a wall. I wanted to take pictures of people being tired and sleeping, but I was worried they might get annoyed easily. They were probably already plenty of being annoyed by the late flights.

After walking around a bit, the terminal wasn’t big, I had found a chair. Opposite of me sat a girl, maybe 16-18 years old, long curly hair, white shoes with green shoelaces (don’t know why I remember that). She was very cute as she was resting/sleeping with her head in her hand. My first thought was to take a picture. I was already having my camera up and ready, so it wouldn’t have been a problem. I didn’t want to take her picture before asking if it was ok. Mostly because of the people around me giving me “what a perv” stares, but perhaps mainly because of her parents, giving me the “if you so much as point that camera at my daughter, I will make you burst into flames” glare. She was also sleeping, and I didn’t want to wake her up. I don’t know if it’s a Swedish thing, but it’s custom to not wake sleeping people.

After a while she woke up, and I had no more Swedish excuses. I think I sat their 30 minutes, trying not to stare at her, trying to get the courage to ask her “hello, can I take your picture? oh, by the way, can you pretend to sleep?”, in Swedish. I think she was from Norway, so the conversation would have been pretty smooth. I stand up and decide to walk over to her, exactly when my dad says the plane is leaving and we have to hurry. We really had to hurry, I was the last person on the bus, but it annoyed me the entire flight back. I am over it now though. Or perhaps not. Why else did I write this entry?