How To Bypass Comcast's BitTorrent Throttling  —  Comcast is using an application from the broadband management company Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic.  It breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds if it's not a Comcast user inside your community boundary.

Source:   TorrentFreak
Author:   Ernesto
Link:   http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-bypass-comcast…

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Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Web-based instant messaging service Meebo connects to any and every IM chat client you can shake an avatar at, and now the popular in-browser chat application integrates tightly with your Firefox sidebar with the new Meebo Firefox extension. The extension supports visual IM notifications and drag and drop link and image sharing directly from web sites in addition to other already existing Meebo features—including file sharing. There really aren't any robust, fully cross-platform chat applications out there (though there are a few great platform-specific apps), but with this new Firefox extension, Meebo is getting close.

After you install, you can either sign in to accounts individually or sign in to your Meebo account, which holds all of your different account credentials so you can sign in to multiple IM accounts at once.

Once connected, you've got a simple contact management pane in the sidebar that you can view or collapse easily. You can even drag web content onto contact names to automatically open a new IM and share the link or image. In the meantime, your IM conversations all take place inside a Meebo tab, which is automatically opened when you sign in. The Meebo extension is free, should work wherever Firefox does. I know there are tons of Meebo fans out there, so let us know how the new extension is working out for you in the comments.

Reader Brett writes in with an interesting observation about his shared iTunes library, which he plays from his laptop and his desktop:

Previous to the latest update of iTunes, I could only have one installation of iTunes running at a time—either the desktop would work or the laptop would work. The error message was something like 'iTunes library already in use.' However, with the latest release, I've found that I can have iTunes open on both.

A quick test between my MacBook and Powerbook confirmed Brett's findings. You can play music from a single shared library on two machines simultaneously and edit ratings and playlists, which update on each computer—effectively removing the need to sync the iTunes library file manually. But it's not perfect.

Listening to the two libraries at once, for the most part, goes without a hitch. Playcount and ratings do update across libraries (eventually, if not immediately.) If you edit ratings on a song (which means iTunes has to write to its library file) and try to access that same song right away, you'll get an error like this one:

So this isn't without its choppiness or risks. I also had one machine intermittently lose track of where media files were located on the shared drive while accessing the same library. (You get the little exclamation point and iTunes says it can't find the file, and prompts you to browse for it.) In both cases, by just restarting iTunes all was well again.

Brett also says:

Prior to the latest update, I could see the iPod on my laptop when it was plugged into my desktop. Now, that no longer happens.

My tests also confirmed this, and further testing opening and closing the same library on two machines triggered another interesting error message.

Disclaimer and notes: I only tested this on two Macs, not two PC's, using the Mac's built-in file sharing. As far as I know, the iTunes library file is not compatible between Mac and PC (due to the differences in how each OS addresses file paths), so I doubt that will work at all. Brett says he had this working even when the library was shared remotely with Hamachi.

If you try this yourself, be sure to back up your iTunes library first, because having two machines write to the same file, in theory, can corrupt it. Anyone else give this a try? Let us know how it went in the comments. Thanks, Brett!

Ubuntu 7.10, the "Gutsy Gibbon" release of popular Linux distribution, is officially out this morning. You can download a live CD, request a CD through the mail, and users of 7.04 (or "Feisty Fawn") can upgrade. Check out our screenshot tour of Gutsy to see what's new and improved. Ubuntu 7.10 is, of course, completely free, and runs on PCs (and Macs) with 32- or 64-bit Intel or AMD processors.

Comedy Central will today launch a dedicated website for “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” that is designed to offer fans free video clips from the show.

Although it would be easy to mock Comedy Central’s I can’t believe 2004 called launch of free Daily Show clips, the offering is slightly better than it first appears; the site includes 13,000 clips representing every minute of the show since it launched in 1999, according to the LA Times.

Comedy Central content has long been a favorite illegal upload on YouTube, and BitTorrent provides ample downloads of most of Stewart’s back catalog.

Previous Stewart understudy and South Carolina Presidential Candidate Stephen Colbert has long had his own website at Colbertnation.com, and offers a program that is preferred by some. Its later time slot never seems to prevent high peer and seed ratios on BitTorrent.

Comedy Central’s parent company Viacom sued Google for copyright infringement on YouTube in March.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

There’s been a lot of speculation over the future of the music industry and the conversation has begun to shift from “Can they sell DRMed music” to “Can they sell music at all”. Last week Radiohead ran one of the biggest tests of legally distributed free music by letting users name their price for “In Rainbows”, their latest album.

However, free doesn’t seem cheap enough. Despite the potentially free download, over 240,000 users got the album from peer to peer BitTorrent networks on the first day of release, according to Forbes. Since then, the album was downloaded about 100,000 more times each day, totaling more than 500,000. By comparison, Radiohead pushed 1.2 million sales of the album through their site, including pre-orders. File sharing networks are expected to surpass legal downloads in the coming days.

While the numbers may seem drastic, it’s really more a tale of how late to the game the music industry has been. Piracy networks have been growing over the past couple of years, despite the industry’s declared “war” on illegal file sharing. The networks have grown into easy-to-use distribution methods for digital music — even easier than what Radiohead offered. Users could easily grab “In Rainbows” while downloading music from other artists. Radiohead couldn’t be as compelling by only offering their own music and requiring users to take the time to set up an account.

But Radiohead doesn’t have that much to be sad about. The band gets to keep all the proceeds of their digital experiment and has distributed about six times more albums than their last release, which sold 300,000. That seemed to be enough to get EMI thinking harder about changing. Forbes obtained a email form EMI’s chairman saying “The industry, rather than embracing digitalization and the opportunities it brings for promotion of product and distribution through multiple channels, has stuck its head in the sand. Radiohead’s actions are a wake-up call which we should all welcome and respond to with creativity and energy.” So it seems there’s still hope yet that those legal war chests will be put to use on some innovations.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Note: There was no permalink for the story on Apple's news website, here's the full text, with permalink. DW

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers¹ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

It will take until February to release an SDK because we¹re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once?provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones?this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than ³totally open,² we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone¹s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.

Steve

P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch. [Oct 17, 2007]

Quick: What's the difference between putting your PC in Hibernate or Standby mode? Yeah, we weren't sure either. Luckily the Productivity Portfolio weblog schools us on the finer details of Windows XP power schemes. Using Standby:

Your machine recovers quickly as your data is stored in RAM. The slower part is waking up the peripherals. Although your machine is in "standby" the power has been cut to items such as your hard drive and monitor. You're running your machine in a very low power mode, but it is still on. This mode can be useful if you're on a notebook and need to conserve your battery while you step away.

With Hibernate:

The big difference is that your PC has shut down and is not pulling power. Another difference is that your data is saved to your hard disk and not RAM. This makes it a safer, but slower option for shut down and resume.

Not all PCs have the capability and are configured to Hibernate. If yours is, to see the Hibernate option on your XP shutdown screen, hold down the Shift key when you shut down.

In 1975, Frederick Brooks wrote a classic book on software project management called The Mythical Man-Month. In the book, he famously argued that adding more people to a development project will hinder rather than help to get things done faster. The reason is that having more people working on the project introduces a non-linear overhead in communication.

Five years before Brooks' book, a software development methodology called the Waterfall Model was coined. This approach applied the insights from mature engineering disciplines (mechanical, civil, etc.) to software. The idea was to construct systems by first gathering requirements, then doing the design, then implementing it, then testing, and finally getting it out the door in one linear sequence.

We have come a long way since then and learned a lot about making software. The Waterfall Model is now considered a flawed method because it is so rigid and unrealistic. In the real world, software projects have ill-defined and constantly evolving requirements, making it impossible to think everything through at once. Instead, the best software today is created and evolved using agile methods. These techniques allow engineers to continuously re-align software with business and customer needs.

With the advent of modern programming languages (Java, PHP, Python and Ruby), rich libraries, and unprecedented infrastructure services like those from Amazon, we are arriving at yet another evolutionary step. Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube and other poster children of the new web era were developed by just a handful of programmers. To build software today all you need is a few good men (or women!). In this post we trace how we got here and where we are heading next.

Why The Waterfall Model Failed

Non-technical people tend to think that software is soft or easily changeable. Since there are no visible nuts and bolts and no hood to open people think that software can be tweaked and re-wired on a whim. Of course, this is not the case. Software, like any mechanical system, has a design and the structure; it is not as soft as it seems.

Yet the accelerating pace of business requires constant changes to software. Older development methods completely fail to address business needs. Using the Waterfall Model, these changes were impossible, the development cycle was too long, systems were over engineered and ended up costing a fortune, and often did not work right.

The problem was that the Waterfall Model was arrogant. The arrogance came from the fact that we believed that we could always engineer the perfect system on the first try. The second problem with it was that in nature, dynamic systems are not engineered, they evolve. It is the evolutionary idea that lead to the development of agile methods.

Agile Methods - Evolving Software

In the early nineties a number of agile software development methods emerged. While they differed in details, they agreed at large that software development needed a major rethinking. First, software has to embrace change. Today's assumptions and requirements may change tomorrow, and software needs to respond to changes quickly. To meet the challenge, agile approaches advocate focusing on simplicity. Make the simplest possible system that satisfies today's requirements and when tomorrow comes, be ready to adapt.

Two techniques pioneered by agile methods are worth particular attention - refactoring and developer testing. Refactoring, elegantly described by Martin Fowler in his classic book is the idea of improving the design of the existing code without changing how it works.

Refactoring is what allows agile systems to embrace change, while remaining elegant and free from rot. Like an interior decorator continuously changes and improves the layout of your furniture, agile developers move code around to improve the product as a whole. Code is constantly changed to make sure we end up with the simplest, and best possible system that reflects our current needs.

To make sure that changes do not break the code, agile methods introduced unit tests. As each agile project unfolds, it grows the base of unit tests. Each test is focused on a single component of the system and acts as an insurance that the component works as expected. Typically, the tests are run continuously against the code and require immediate fixes in case of a failure.

The software systems created using agile methods are much more successful because they are evolved and adapted to the problem. Like living organisms, these systems are continuously reshaped to fit the dynamic landscape of changing requirements. Without a doubt, agile methods made a major impact on how we think about building software today - dynamically and continuously.

It's The Libraries, Stupid!

While we discovered better way of making software, we also discovered better programming languages. C was replaced with C++, then came Java. Perl was great, but PHP and Python took its lessons further. More recently came Ruby, which has become very popular because of its natural way of expressing code. Because of this evolution, today we have a number of excellent, and virtually equivalent programming languages.

While the choice of programming language is typically a sensitive subject, the truth is that it is not the language, but the libraries that come with it that make a difference. C++ never had the standard libraries that Java has. Yes, Java is the simpler language, but people used C++ for a decade just fine. What gives Java the edge is its rich set of reusable libraries. The story is similar with PHP. It has been the language of choice for web developers precisely because it comes with such rich support for web and database processing.

In addition to the libraries that come with modern languages, the open source movement has also contributed a wealth of code towards global software infrastructure. Notably, just the Apache foundation on its own has created a huge amount of high quality reusable code. We have now arrived at an age where we have a strong foundation for building complex software systems. We know the methods and we have the tools, so what does that mean?

The Future of Software Development: Just a Few Good Men

Since early days of software development people struggled to build good systems. More and more people where thrown at the problem, making matters worse. But with the recent explosion of social web we've witnessed a new and interesting phenomenon: a handful of developers are now able to build systems that are used by millions of people. How can this be?

The secret is that as with any good endeavor it only takes a few good men (and/or women!). With a bit of discipline and a ton of passion, high quality engineers are able to put together systems of great complexity on their own.

Equipped with a modern programming language, great libraries, and agile methods, a couple of smart guys in the garage can get things done much better and faster than an army of mediocre developers.

We are likely to see a few changes over the coming years:

• High-quality, passionate software engineers will be in very high demand and will make substantially more money.
• The developers who do not have great programming skills are going to have to look for jobs elsewhere.
• The changes that we are witnessing today in the social software market are going to reach the enterprise level.
• Software off shoring will make less and less economical sense.
• Computer science is going to remain a highly competitive and prestigious field.

Conclusion

Ironically, we are coming full circle with the mythical man-month. What was true twenty years ago is true of course today, but for a whole new set of reasons. An awesome array of programming languages and infrastructure libraries combined with agile methods has allowed us to break free of old software development dogmas. Just a handful of great engineers can now successfully build systems of great complexity. Craftsmanship has finally come to software engineering!