random($foo)

burst! is the best BitTorrent client I’ve found so far. BT++ is a wxPython client, theoretically cross-platform. A friend recommends mlMac, an mldonkey front-end that also has torrent support.

Recently, I’ve been on a BitTorrent kick. Truly impressive what’s out there. Bytemonsoon is an interesting tracker that has a category dedicated entirely to comics, which is great. There are sets of +30yo books, scanned from aged first prints. Most of these are packaged in CBR or CBZ format, which are basically numbered RAR and ZIP archives, coded for the CDisplay Comic Reader, a pretty awesomely made comic viewing program (Windows only). Quite cool.

When using BitTorrent on my PC, I found myself consistently getting spontaneous reboots. I finally looked into it, and lo and behold, it’s a known problem with my Netgear FA311 card. The suggestion to upgrade the drivers to the latest (v1.80) seems to have fixed things. Always a pleasant surprise when you can find a fix, and it actually works as advertised.

Pitchfork has a great article on picking a new national anthem that starts off with a bunch of fun facts about the present anthem and ends with each Pitchfork staff member picking a song they’d like to see as the new national anthem.

Tried out iChatAV (audio) tonight. A much better experience than expected. Very little lag, and surprisingly good audio quality (going across a 15″ and 12″ Powerbooks on DSL/Cable).

Free-X has released an exploit which allows loading Linux w/o a modchip.

The existance of an exploitable vulnerability within the dashboard could totally compromises the XBOX security system. It will make the box independent from Microsoft signed code and therefore this information is released to the public now on the 4th of July 2003, the day of the XBOX Independence.

I could have used this find/xargs w/ spaces in filename tip a month or two when spaces at the end of a file were screwing with a shell script I had.

• Core Documents of U.S. Democracy
• Declaring Independence: Drafting the Documents
• The Declaration of Indepence (hi-res image)

Reading Marc Andreseen’s recent comments about browser innovation go me thinking about alternatives for web navigation… specifically, what the weaknesses currently are, and how to improve them.

• threading/path navigation – currently, browser histories don’t keep track of the path of you’re browsing: which links you’re following, in what windows (or tabs!), etc. If they did, not only could you very easily pick up where you left off (also for crash recovery), but definitely help you find things, especially when combined with
• historical search – yeah, everyone’s talked about this before, but it still doesn’t seem to exist. In the world of cheap 200GB hard drives, why can’t I keep a searchable cache of all the pages I’ve browsed? Well, it’s not for any technical reason
• statistical bookmarks – would be neat if various filters could be applied to your history corpus to autogenerate bookmarks out of visiting patterns
• intrapage bookmarking/annotations – it’d be nice if you’re location in the page would also be stored. This could be done in a combination of ways – character offsets, xpath, rolling checksums / character diffs. In fact, it’d probably have to use all of those if you’re storing against changing pages (of course, local cache would help alleviate some of this).
• browser lookahead – prefetching simple HEAD requests right now to show link status overlays w/ size/type/status info would be a nice addition to the current prefetching implementation
• tabbed browsing manager – coming soon?

Non-nav improvements:

• syncing – bidirectional profile auto-syncing
• better blocking – for images, other media types that let you block by URI fragment, or properties, or any combination thereof
• site-by-site plug-in control
• fine grained transfer control – the ability to do absolute/percentage based throttling by host, window, etc.

Holy, crap, this two-parter Observer article is a must read: The last resort

When you have a teenager on the rampage, who are you going to turn to? In America, parents send their troubled offspring to Jamaica’s Tranquility Bay – a ‘behaviour-modification centre’ which charges $40,000 a year to ‘cure’ them. Decca Aitkenhead, the first journalist to gain access to the centre in five years, wonders if there isn’t too high a price to pay

Discussion at boingboing.