Back to blogging

It has been almost three years since i posted on this blog. Looking back to my first post "Addicted to Fish" brings back memories of days spent immersed in the Internet, browsing to be amused, inspired or informed.

This is me getting back to blogging, hoping to bring you evermore interesting posts, information, and thoughts. I am looking forward to writing about PHP, android applications and any other information which might be of use to you.

How to increase Bittorrent speeds - Part two

The second most important thing to do when downloading with bittorrent is to find torrents which has a good peer/seeder ratio. Peers are the one who are currently downloading and seeders are the ones who have already downloaded the file and are giving away for upload.
The best choice would be a torrent with a good number of seeders and peer number half that of seeders.
There are many private trackers which you could use. Most of them require that you maintain a certain ratio of uploaded and downloaded amount. Meaning, if you download a 750 MB file. You are expected to let others download from you by uploading 750 MB's. Thus making sure others will have the opportunity to get the file.

Some of the most famous trackers are:
www.thepiratebay.org
www.demonoid.com
www.mininova.org

You cant find a comparison on of torrent trackers here http://comparebt.blogspot.com/

Hope this has been useful to all, leave a comment or opinion and wait for more.

How to increase bit torrent speeds - Part One

There are a couple of ways which you can employ to improve your download speeds while using bit torrent. I have been an avid user of torrents for quite some time. Here I am going to share with you, some of the settings or tricks by which I try to attain the maximum allowed bandwidth and download speed.

Always use PEER GUARDIAN

This is the most important thing to do when you are downloading using torrents. Remember, when you sometimes download that 'movie' or download that series and your bandwidth graph shows you’re your download speed is the maximum available bandwidth of your connection, but the progress bar does not increase as it should, and the hash files or wasted files size keep increasing. This happens when you are trying to download a poisoned torrent.

You can search more about poisoned torrents, but for the moment you just need to remember that this will cause your torrent client to download a lot of unwanted hash/waste files which are trying to appear as genuine content of the file you are attempting to download. Most of the time, this is being done by people who are trying to give you a hard time because you maybe downloading their content or movie.

You can prevent these people from connecting to your computer and sending you waste files by using peer guardian. Now you won’t have to wonder why the file which is supposed to be downloaded within 3 hours is taking days to finish.

What peer guardian does is, it has an updatable database of IP addresses which people have found to be actively poisoning torrents. It also has other categories of IP addresses which you could prevent from connecting to your computer, such as known government IP addresses, known educational bodies IP addresses which might be monitoring P2P for studies purposes, etc.

So to conclude, Peer Guardian will assist you to be partially invisible to monitoring bodies such as governments, movie companies, and so forth. It also helps you to download the content faster by preventing known computers from sending you fake files or waste data. This is a must have tool for any bit torrent user.

I almost forgot… Peer Guardian is open source software, thus you don’t have to worry about it having a backdoor or spyware which might be collecting information about you.

I will continue with the second part in the next post. Do let me know your thoughts or questions in the comments.

Torrent client software : http://www.bittorrent.com/
Peer Guardian software : http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/

Which is the best Bittorrent client?

I got a call from a friend the other day, he wanted to know the best torrent client to use. I gave him a short answer, µTorrent. Actually µTorrent has now been acquired by BitTorrent Inc. so lets refer to it as BiTorrent client from now on. I have to mention both these clients because, initially µTorrent was written in C++ and was a closed source freeware. Before BitTorrent acquired µTorrent around end of 2006, before then BitTorrent client was written in Python and it was an open source client.

I have used many torrent clients over the years, Azureus, Opera, BitComet, KTorrent, µTorrent. i find BitTorrent to be the least resource intensive and also the amongst the best featured clients out there. Even the installer file is only 853KB. Imagine that,nowadays you don't find that many installers which you can put on a floppy disk.

BitTorrent gives you all the features which you may have been using on other clients, in a very efficient and small package, and it does not have a huge memory signature as some of the famous clients like Azureus.

ENGADGET VS GIZMODO

As with many of you who are interested in being up to date with technological news, i too go about taking my daily doze from various tech sites and blogs. Most frequent being Gizmodo and Engadget. Over time i have come to notice that a very high percentage of the breaking news and articles are practically the same on both these blogs.
i have been too lazy to go about running a proper comparison to see which blog actually brings the news quicker and comes up with more original content.
Then again, one might argue that there are many other tech blogs to satisfy ones needs, i am just mentioning the onces which i am familiar. If you happen to know of a better place to take the daily dose of tech news, do let me know.

Bionic eyes: Is this the future of computer display

We have all seen movies which show images and various other information being displayed seamlessly in front of the eye. As if floating in front of the eyes. Well, the days are not far when we will be able to do the same in real life.

Engineers at the UW have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.
There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle's speed projected onto the windshield. Video game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.

The prototype device contains an electric circuit as well as red light-emitting diodes for a display, though it does not yet light up. The lenses were tested on rabbits for up to 20 minutes and the animals showed no adverse effects.

A full-fledged display won't be available for a while, but a version that has a basic display with just a few pixels could be operational "fairly quickly," according to Parviz.

Read more here : http://uwnews.org/

Sri Lanka on the brink of war again!!!

Sri Lankan Civil War is an ongoing conflict on the island-nation of Sri Lanka. Since the year 1983, there has been on-and-off civil war, predominantly between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE, also known as the Tamil Tigers), a separatist militant organization who fight for the creation of an independant state named Tamil Eelam in the northeast of the island. It is estimated that 68,000 people have died in the war since 1983 and it has caused significant harm to the population and economy of the country, as well as leading to the ban of the LTTE as a terrorist organization in 32 countries including the US, Australia, the countries of the EU, and Canada.

The possibility of a lasting peace were raised when a cease-fire was declared in December 2001, and a ceasefire agreement was signed with international mediation in 2002. However hostilities renewed in late 2005 and the conflict has continued to escalate, resulting in the deaths of over 4,000 people since November 2005. The government has launched a number of military offensives against the LTTE since July 2006, and driven the LTTE out of the entire Eastern province of the island, and on the fifth anniversary of the signing of the agreement the LTTE declared they would "resume their freedom struggle to achieve statehood". The government's forces also claimed recently to have destroyed all the large arms smuggling vessels that belonged to the LTTE. Just after the government's military commanders expressed their hope to win the war in the near future, on January 2, 2008 the government formally announced withdrawal from the ceasefire agreement.

Please read further.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Civil_War