Bittorrent For Your Mother

While searching for a suitable mirror for a the latest Insurgency release, I stumbled upon an innovative service called Bitlet. The service rolls a Bittorrent client and a torrent file into Java Applet. This removes the need to install a standalone Bittorrent client in order to download files.

To be honest, I'm a little suprised I haven't seen something like this a long time ago. I'm also suprised thatservices like fileplanet are even necessary anymore. But I'm glad that Bitlet is picking up some momentum. For the files I tried, it worked very well.

Groovy Is Groovy

While I appreciate the need for strongly typed languages, I don't find them very enjoyable to program in. I prefer to prototype and refine as needed. With Java in particular this is difficult to do. But its hard to ignore all the rich libraries being written in/for java these days.

Groovy is an agile and dynamic language for the Java VM. A number of different colleagues have recommended Groovy to me and I've finally sat down and played with it. I'm very impressed to say the least. Besides being able to use java libraries easily from within a Groovy script, you can also compile Groovy code into regular java bytecode, or you can embed groovy directly into your Java application.

Personally, I'm looking forward to prototyping using Groovy in some open source projects I've been thinking of. Anything that is too slow can be refactored in Java. Perhaps by someone else ;)

Next-Generation P2P To Change The World

Those who have already used P2P file sharing software regularly are probably already aware that technology is moving far faster than the business models of large content providers. While the Viacoms of the world are going after the YouTubes, they're completely unaware that the war has already been decided. Next generation P2P software promises to give websites with budgets of tens of dollars the ability to compete with YouTube, Viacom and every other broadcaster.

If you want to see the proof, then go visit the SwarmPlayer trial page. It is a project of the P2P-Next consortium, which recently recieved €19 million in government/corporate funding. While presently only a research proof of concept, SwarmPlayer supports both live broadcast streaming as well as video on demand. Once perfected this technology will radically democratize content distrobution.

If YouTube is giving Viacom a headache, then SwarmPlayer is the red laser dot hovering on its forehead. The trigger has yet to be pulled.