Bittorrents have been around for a few years, and most techies, gamers, and heavy mass-downloaders have been using them for a long while. I thought I would talk a little about bittorrents and basic usage in a more user-friendly way, to help some of those who are maybe a little less savvy, or whose eyes glazed at the word “bittorrent” before finding out how beautiful they can be.

For a full spec description, check out the Wikipedia article.

Basically, there are files, files that people like to share. These are video files, music files, could be a whole CD of digital pictures of your grandparents’ great Alaskan vacation… Whatever the case. Some are rather large, and don’t download to your computer very quickly over the internet. So some different ideas were thrown around to help deal with moving these big packs of bits from one place to another.
There is compression (Windows: Zip, Mac: Sit, Unix: tar.gz), which you could think of as putting a bunch of clothes in a suitcase, then zipping it, and maybe even sitting on the suitcase to squeeze the air out. When you reach your destination, you open the suitcase, and all the clothes that were in there are there again, but they took up less room in transit than they do in the closet at either end of the journey.
There is also peer-to-peer sharing, and bittorrents, Which I am lumping together just for this basic description. There are big differences, but again, this is a basic overview. You are able to do P2P sharing on any file, whether it’s a zipped file, a CD image (ISO), or even a plain text “recipe.txt”. The idea is that a bunch of people from any number of places all over the internet are sharing the same file. To do this, you have a program that can keep track of the file you are after, and who else in the network is sharing it. This program is able to break the file you are trying to get into pieces, and download small bits from many sharers at the same time, which is faster then downloading each piece from one sharer, then requesting the next piece from the same sharer.

You and up with faster downloads, with your same internet connection.

At the same time, the bits and pieces that you already have are being shared with others who are trying to get the same file. People are sharing with you, you are sharing with others. It’s beautiful.

There is a lot of press out there saying that filesharing is illegal, that bittorrents are illegal, and that both are bad things to do. This is entirely untrue. The record industry and the movie industry are waging battle on people who are sharing their copyrighted material. Saying that p2p sharing your “MetalBack” songs or downloading the “Death Hogs Twelve” game by bittorrent in order to get them and enjoy them for free is entirely different from saying that using p2p or bittorrents is wrong.

A really good example of the legal, moral, and correct usage of bittorrents is using them to download OpenOffice or Any given Linux ISO. These projects are Open Source. The developers have designed and built the programs, and do not charge a thing for them. They want people to enjoy the fruits of their labor. The notes on their webpages and in the license areas always admonish everyone to please pass a copy along and share. An excellent Bittorrent tracker for open source downloads is LinuxTracker. There, you can find the .torrent files for any number of flavors of Linux and other open-source goodness. There are also plenty of links, discussion, and info there for all of the downloads, and on Linux and open source in general. Download the .torrent file and start up your bittorrent software, and when the download is complete, enjoy.

Bittorrent software include:

• Bittorrent
• µTorrent
• Azureus

In the American culture, we are so afraid to talk about religion, that all of us end up suffering. In turn, Americans have very narrow views, based on assumptions, glossed-over definitions, and agendas put forth by extremely small handful of people each of us trust for spiritual guidance.

Americans fail at religion

When I was in high school, there were a lot of kids who were very confused about their spiritual lives, and then there were a lot of them who were happy and spiritual, but talking with any of them for a length of time, and it was obvious that they were just as confused. They put forth a Cheshire cat grin, and regurgitated things that they had heard at church, but inside, they were very unsettled.

My first college course was on comparative religions, and I gained a lot of insight. The USA Today article mentions making classes like these part of school curriculum. If these classes are taught with some tact, it could be highly beneficial to everyone. More knowledge never hurts.

The BBC compilation

There is a fine line to draw when offering a class like this at a public school. Public schools have to be quite gun shy, but communities can do this. individuals can find all of the information freely. Church groups can as well. The first issue that comes to mind is the immediate negative discussion about covering one religion over another, or one more completely than another.

That is exactly why the class setup is important. When I took the class in college, our textbook was The World’s Religions by Huston Smith. Huston Smith has been writing books on comparative religion since at least the mid ’50s. It’s an excellent book, well researched, and makes for a good overview over the span of 10-12 weeks as a study. My local library has four copies available, and I still have my copy as well.

There are tons of people out there who have an agenda for their own beliefs, and think that any study of any other belief “would detract from the study and application of our faith” blah blah blah…. It should be obvious that anyone who is confused in their faith would benefit from the study. Anyone who is devout in their faith would benefit from understanding objectively what it is that they believe, and how that differs from other religions and sects. Everyone should have an idea of the beliefs of all the major religions. comparing and contrasting with beliefs outside our own, we often can generate perspective and questions we would have otherwise missed.

This is a high-level overview, and ignores a lot of variables, but it’s really interesting, nonetheless.

More statistics
More high-level overviews

There really should be a more open discourse on world beliefs within any belief structure. An honest, structured view would allow those who are lost a way of gaining perspective. You can’t have the fear that one of your pupils might decide that they belong with another faith — it’s part of their own personal spiritual journey, which is so much more important than gaining numbers of adherents for your own faith.

Ticking away…
The new time change is tomorrow night, and there is quite a bit of discussion about the change being detrimental to transaction-based and time-sensitive systems, mainly in databases.

The main thing to be sure of, though, is that your system itself will update the time correctly.

Mark posted about checking this by using

# zdump -v EST5EDT | grep 2007

The output should look exactly like this:

EST5EDT Sun Mar 11 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2007 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
EST5EDT Sun Mar 11 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2007 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
EST5EDT Sun Nov 4 05:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:59:59 2007 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
EST5EDT Sun Nov 4 06:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:00:00 2007 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

The zdump is going to open up the binary file where the daylight savings clock changes are kept…. mind you, that the example is checking the one for Eastern time… but if you have done the updates, this will have changed as well, so even if you are in another time zone, checking this one is fine. Piping the contents to the grep command is just for human sanity… we only need the lines that have to do with the year 2007.

The output we get shows the time getting updated in two steps when daylight saving starts, and again in two steps when it ends, first with an offset of -18000 seconds (5 hours) and the second, switching the “is it Daylight Saving Time?” flag to “yes” and issuing an offset of -14400 seconds (4 hours).

But think about your cron jobs… This is from the man page for cron on a linux box:

Note that this means that non-existent times, such as “missing hours” during daylight savings conversion, will never match, causing jobs scheduled during the “missing times” not to be run. Similarly, times that occur more than once (again, during daylight savings conversion) will cause matching jobs to be run twice.

and the same from a Solaris 10 enterprise server:

If some form of daylight savings or summer/winter time is in effect, then jobs scheduled during the switchover period could be executed once, twice, or not at all.

Just more things for you to double check. Ending up with no backup could be bad, but ending up with it done twice isn’t necessarily awful. You will need to check your specific jobs and decide if any changes are needed.