Tidbits @ Kassemi

A collection of opinions, thoughts, tricks and misc. information.

Thursday, July 27, 2006

 

Time Travelers

Your efforts lack recognition, an absence fueling the torturing fires of your mind. Only death carries the extinguisher - an obvious and indisputable fact fixed to the forefront of your consciousness. To you, my fellow time traveler, I give my wishes, for better times, graspable brilliance, and remarkable voyages.

James

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

 

Diet Mountain Dew, Where Art Thou?

Mountain dew is my blood. Five or six tasty, energy boosting 2-liters enter my system daily. The juice fills my body with warmth, wakes me up, and just makes me pretty damn happy. Somehow it even gets rid of those headaches I get when I haven't had it for a while :) After a 75 pound experience with regular mountain dew I decided to switch to the diet stuff. A year later the weight is gone and my desire for the substance only stronger.

Imagine my surprise then when I walk into the supermarket and the stuff isn't there! None of it. Okay, I thought. A switch to good ol' diet pepsi in the interum would be fine... No. Turns out I need the green-yellow juice. Nothing else will do. Diet Dr Pepper sticks to my throat, Diet Pepsi doesn't have the kick (nor do Diet Orange Soda or Diet A&W)... What's a simple programmer to do? Apparently my hunger for this stuff has caused a short in supplies in the Southwestern US. What else explains it? I stumbled into about nine different supermarkets today, and finally picked off the last that one of them had (5 two-liters), so I'm good for today... But what about tomorrow?

If you are a representative of the Pepsi corporation, I beg that you a) send more supplies to the Albuquerque area immediately, and b) sponsor me. I'll post your ads all over this page, I'll scream your name from my rooftop, I'll wear your shirts, I'll put bumper stickers on my car... Anything! And for those of you who live in areas with a steady supply of Diet Mountain Dew, please help a brother out :). If you think I'm joking, I'm not. my phone:

505-991-0973 (or call my room-mate: 505-991-1143)

and my e-mail:

james [at] tweekedideas [dot] com

Thank you all for your support! Good night, and good luck, James.

Update: (Jul 29, 2006) stores are stocked :) Thank you, The Pepsi Corporation. The offer for sponsorship still stands.


Sunday, July 16, 2006

 

No whirlpool for python... Not anymore :)

I just finished writing a c extension module for python so you can finally
use whirlpool with python. There might have been one already, but I sure couldn't
find it. This pretty much just wraps the C whirlpool implementation on the main site.


Whirlpool for Python


I put it up on Kepty just to show something about why kepty is good, and to make
myself feel better about the service that GETS NO VISITORS! (Just hope it doesn't
crash before you head over there to grab the file).

Good day everyone,
James

Sunday, July 09, 2006

 

Creating a torrent site

Hey everyone,

If you've known me at all you know that something I truly desire to do is create a unique torrent site... What's been stopping me? Legality. It's a gray area, and I'd hate for my business to suffer because I broke a law I didn't even know about.

For the past few months I've been trying to figure out how to create a legal torrent site, and do it without fear of lawsuit. Last night I got fed up with the fear and decided to let the RIAA answer my question for me... "Can I create a torrent site? What do I have to fear?"

The answer became clear while I was writing the following e-mail... If the RIAA wants to cut down on piracy, why not offer a fucking way to help us developers do what they want? Torrent sites get thousands and thousands of torrents a day, and sifting through them for legal purposes can be a mind-numbing and unrewarding task. 1) Here's the e-mail:


Dear Record Industry Association of America,

I'm looking to add torrent file distribution features to a site of mine, and, since you're the entity who is (arguably) the one most concerned with the distribution of torrent files I'm writing to ask you what features you would like to see in such a site that would make you more comfortable with its existence.

Perhaps I should stress that this feature will be designed for the distribution of LEGAL torrents, such as linux distributions and copyright-free music, but since my plans are for this to be community-based it MAY be possible for a user to upload a copyrighted piece. Is there some sort of API that you would like this to be programmed with that would allow you to notify me when a file is suspicious or illegal? If not, may I recommend the creation of one? Perhaps allow programmers to check a database against hashes of files that you consider copyrighted? There are many developers out there who would be more than willing to add such compatiblity to their site to avoid lawsuit. I'd even be willing to create such a service if you were to participate in keeping the database up to date.

In any case I look forward to your response and I thank you for your time.



And here's a little more detailed idea of what I'm proposing:

  1. User uploads torrent file.
  2. Torrent file is hashed (md5 or something faster)...
  3. Torrent site contacts riaa/mpaa api with the hash.
  4. API returns a rating on the scale of 0 to 10, 0 being no risk, 10 being high risk.
  5. The torrent site can make the CHOICE whether or not to make the file public, but a proper implementation would allow the owner of the site to review high risk items before making them available to the general public (abuse by mpaa or riaa would be limited by this).


This solves all their problems! No change to their business model, no profit problems, nothing! All it requires is a little work to put the system up (which I've even offered to do FOR THEM), and maybe a few man-hours checking on torrents (which they do already, anyway).

So, the next time the RIAA or MPAA tells you that piracy is making a huge dent in their profits, tell them that they DO have the power to do something about it, and that they start evolving and stop whining.

Talk to you later,
James

Monday, July 03, 2006

 

Next Project

Just thought I'd keep my blog up to date with what I'm working on. Here's a teaser:



Yeah, but it's not a clone of what you're thinking... It's MUCH more than that. Stay tuned to see a) if it works out, and b) to see what's so great about it.

Update: The project is Kepty. It's online now: Kepty.
-James

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