OSSPACK

The relationship of recreation of the Oregon (peach, observation of hunting), modernized tuesday, the 30 september, from the unit of the Oregon of the fish and the wild fauna.

It's release time! Yes, MonoTorrent 0.50 has hit. There have been a lot of changes since the last release, and this time, it's more than just under the hood fixes. There are several reasons why the new release is so much better than previous releases, I've listed the more important ones below, but first, the packages!

You can grab a precompiled binary suitable for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
You can grab the sourcecode here as a .tar.gz archive.
There are also packages available on the OpenSuse build service, and of course the tag for the release can be gotten from svn.

Now, to the features and updates.

WebSeeding Support
There is provisional support for Http Web Seeding. This means when you're hosting a torrent, you can add standard Http servers as 'seeds'. No extra configuration is needed. This is still an experimental feature, and still has some corner cases where it doesn't work, all bug reports on this are welcome!

IP Address Banning
You can now ban individual IP addresses or IP Address ranges. Block lists from Emule, PeerGuardian and SafePeer are supported out of box by the built in parser, and any custom list can easily by loaded so long as you can parse the list into IPAddress objects. Internally the banlist is stored using the extremely efficient RangeCollection written by Aaron Bockover.

Efficent Torrent Streaming
Thanks to the efforts of Karthik Kailash and David Sanghera, we now have a special downloading mode in MonoTorrent which allows you to efficiently stream audio/video. Psuedo random piece picking is used to ensure you download pieces from a 'high priority' range before anything else. User code can set this 'High priority' range to be the next X bytes of data. When everything in the high priority range is downloaded, standard rarest-first picking is used.

Peer Exchange
uTorrent style Peer Exchange support is supported thanks to the tireless efforts of Olivier Dufour. This extension allows peer information to be passed across a bittorrent connection. In practice this means that if the tracker only gives you 1 peer, you can discover (potentially) hundreds more via peer exchange.

Enhanced compatibilty with broken clients
There are still clients out there which transmit corrupted BEncodedDictionary objects. These guys need to read the spec and ensure that their dictionaries keys are sorted using a binary comparison. In the cases where the order appears to not matter, I've implemented support for ignoring the error. This should reduce the number of clients which are disconnected due to sending corrupt messages - this means higher performance.

Simplified Threading API
The core of MonoTorrent has undergone a complete rewrite. Previously, all the worker threads interacted with the core by taking out locks, then doing their work. This meant that implementing something as trivial as cancelling a pending asynchronous request was actually pretty hard. That method was actually horrendously prone to deadlocking the engine.

Nowadays all the worker threads add a task to the main thread, and the main thread does all the work. "What about the performance" i hear you ask, well, it performs the exact same, but it's so much easier to maintain and add new features to.

It also means the engine should be deadlock free, because there are no locks anymore. Nice.

NUnit Tests
As with all big software projects, regressions are bad. A year ago I had virtually no NUnit tests. Nowadays there are over 130 NUnit tests for the engine. While this doesn't even test 1/2 the code in MonoTorrent, each test adds that little bit more certainty that I don't regress.

There are also a bunch bugfixes here and there, and more big features in the pipeline. As a taster, DHT support is already active and enabled in SVN should you wish to test it out.

The 2.6.27-rc9 prepatch is out. "I know, I know, I said that -rc8 was supposed to be the last -rc, and that I'd release 2.6.27 this weekend. I lied. Sue me. I merged two subtle regression fixes today, and while both looked perfectly fine and had been tested by the people involved in the regressions, I just couldn't bring myself to then just slap a 'v2.6.27' on it without some more testing." Expect the final 2.6.27 release sometime over the next week.

I will be in Washington talking at the Red Hat Government Developers and Users Conference tomorrow. I will be running a SELinux BOF session so if anyone is going to be there and wants to stop by, you are welcome. Other then visiting Red Hat customers, I am also giving a talk on Thursday night at George Mason University on SELinux.  I do not know if this is open to the public.Â

I have done talks at local Linux Users groups in New England, but have not been invited to talk at too many Colleges/Universities. :^(
But I do enjoy doing the talks. 

Dan

Everyone needs to back up their computers, but when you have machines running on different platforms and different operating systems, it can be annoying to have to learn several interfaces. Areca and plan/b are two Java-based backup solutions that can run on any platform, including Linux, Windows, and Unix. Although maintenance has been discontinued for plan/b, both apps are worth a look.

I respect Richard Stallman for the same reason I respect gravity. The man is a force of nature. He is like the iron core of the Earth: fixed, central, essential. So, when I read a story like "Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman", which ran in the Guardian last week, I take notice. And I'm not alone. A search on Google for stallman "cloud computing" brings up 142,000 results.

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There is this scene in "Gandhi", one of my all time favorite movies, where one of the policemen says "He is coming" referring to Gandhi's arrival in Champaran (See video clip here. Its quite impressive). Well, when I think of the upcoming availability of the XO laptop on Amazon starting November 17, I am reminded of that phrase - "He is coming". While the XO isn't quite Gandhi himself, its impact can be quite revolutionary. Powered by Sugar (no Windows XP for the November sale) it essentially democratizes the access to computing, and hence information. We've witnessed what crowdsourcing can do in cases of Wikipedia and Free and Open Source Software.

Polish Linux: "We have begun this series of articles focusing on Free Software deployments in Polish government departments with the article OpenOffice.org in Łeba. Today we are introducing yet another example of a well-done implementation of OpenOffice.org, in Town Council of Katowice."

Most free software projects produce applications for users. A minority, however, produce specifications or libraries for developers and other contributors. An example of this second type is the recently announced Manju project, whose goal is to make themes easier to create. The project's goal is to write the specifications and scripts for using scalable vector graphics (SVG) files to store widget and other theme-related information that can be used on a variety of toolkits.

The Kentucky has had place hardly with relati drier August and september to you from 1897, but us it could be rain end from the night of tuesday. The 2,62 inches of last the excess recorded rain two months were the amount according to-more lowland during 114 years of record-keeping, second the numbers compile to you from the university of agricultural meterological center of the Kentucky. The drier year for the period of two months was 1897. In the advanced one...