June 2004 Archives

They have arrived.

OK, let me try again.

You know what Tivo is: an appliance that records TV shows as files on a hard drive.

You might know what Bittorrent is: a program that makes file downloads fast by swarming bits of them from your neighbors to you.

Combine the two and you have a very cool gadget. Plug one end into your home network connection, plug the other into your TV, wait a while, and start watching prerecorded programs.

Key points:

• You don't need cable anymore.
• Depending on your connection speed, you can probably watch a live program delayed by a few seconds, assuming a neighbor is recording and sharing it.
• Advertisers can divert their distribution budget into their production budget. In other words, they'll take the money they save on airing commercials and spend it on making commercials that are more enjoyable to watch.

I wish someone would do this!

Cup-a-Noodle products typically have the following instructions:

1. Add boiling water.
2. Cover and wait 5 minutes.
3. Enjoy.

So if I don't enjoy them, is it the manufacturer's fault for producing a bad product, or is it my fault for not following the directions?

This is the best I could come up with for printing out a bunch of bytes from a file into a format that you can put in a C program. I couldn't figure out how to get rid of the trailing junk:

hexdump -e '8/1 "0x%02x, " "\n"' file_to_dump.bin

This morning I took the new Caltrain Baby Bullet train to work. It arrived at both stations right on time!

This is a new Dave's Quick Search Deskbar search, cf (short for "clip file"), that takes either the search arguments or whatever text is on the clipboard and saves it on the desktop as an appropriately-named text file.

Examples:

cf dentist 555-1212
cf [a snippet of text just copied from a web page]

Note that you'll get an ActiveX warning the first time you run. This is probably a good thing.

UnlockMe

I was playing around with some ideas for WINW that involved identifying blocks of content by their SHA-1 hashes. That was what I was doing for peers, but I generalized it to all content. Then I stumbled across the Venti filesystem, which crystallized my vague thoughts very nicely.