Monday, November 26, 2007

In two short days i'll be flying out to madrid for the mono summit. Woohoo! Turns out i'm missing my last 3 days of term, in which i should be getting two tutorials and our first problem sheet for a particular subject. So, not the best time to be fecking off to a foreign country.... ah well!

Also, if that F-Spot guy is about the place who was asking me about upgrading F-Spot to use the latest libgphoto2-sharp, give me a shout via email and let's organise something before i head over. Otherwise, just try and find me between wednesday evening and friday evening.

p.s. if i fail any exams because of this, i'm holding Aaron responsible, he tempted me over with a Chicken Pag! So no new MTP code for banshee if i fail ;)

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

I heard some great news earlier in the week and just got around to checking it out. There's another C# implementation of the BitTorrent protocol being developed! Good stuff! They've been working on it for about a year, and have "the core of the beast" pretty much complete. Thats great stuff! Considering i thought i was the only person with a C# based bittorrent implementation, i thought it'd be great to have a chat with them, see how they solved different issues etc.

So, about 15 mins ago, i loaded up that link and decided to download their alpha client, just to see how it works etc. Thats when i became seriously pissed off.

Without even having run the 'alpha client' i realised that the seedpeer codebase was actually MonoTorrent*. Yes, these guys had the cheek to take my code and pretend it was theirs. They tried to pass off about 18 months of my development time as their development time, without so much as giving me credit or mentioning that they were, in fact, lying when they said "we have almost finished coding the core of the beast". The worst thing is, they weren't even smart enough to do it properly.

So, for anyone out there who has actually used SeedPeer, or has a blog who've blogged about it, please try to make it known that seedpeer == MonoTorrent, except that they don't even use all the features i have available. For example, here's there 'TODO' list:
  • MultiTracker
  • Torrent Creation
  • Custom DHT (faster)
  • Rss Feeds
  • Integrated Search Function (with commenting)
  • Custom Peer Exchange
  • Fast Resume
  • Global/Per torrent Settings
  • Download Priority
  • more...
Here's a list of the features that are already in monotorrent that are in their TODO list:
  • MultiTracker
  • Torrent Creatio
  • Rss Feeds
  • Fast Resume
  • Global/Per torrent Settings
  • Download Priority
  • more...
I suppose this is what you expect by making the code public. People will use it (which is what i want), but then they'll try to pass it off as their own (which is just plain wrong). So, if anyone wants to email the seedpeer people, their contact form is here, so feel free to let them know you know ;) Also, if you want a nice GUI for monotorrent, check out www.monotorrent.com :)

* Yes, i am 100% sure of this. I haven't used reflector to verify, but i'm 100% sure that at least 95% of the code is a direct copy/paste from monotorrent. It might even be 100%. If someone is bored, they can use reflector (or whatever) so they can see i'm not lying. No better proof than looking yourself.

Also, if the seedpeer guys do read this, using an obfusticator won't prevent me from recognising my own code. I can think of a dozen ways offhand to check if a client is my client without having to see the code. It's ridiculously easy.

EDIT: For those of you who know these things, The middle paragraph of the MIT/X11 license states:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
Does that mean if they distribute a binary, they have to include that license header in some form or other?

Friday, November 02, 2007

I decided to install the English dictionary in firefox today so I could get proper spelling corrections when writing emails and whatnot. So I fired up Firefox and browsed my way over to here to grab the English dictionary.

So it turns out that 'American English' is actually 'English' whereas 'British English' is what i wanted. Now, considering 'English' originated in Britain, why the hell do americans insist on referring to 'American English' as 'English' and referrring to English proper as 'British English'. British English is 'English'. You're the one's who created your own seperate spelling and dialect.

It's the equivalent of referring to 'Canadian French' as 'French' and referring to French proper as 'France French'. C'mon guys, you didn't invent it, stop trying to make it sound like ye did!

On other news, my macbook is in for repair for an unknown amount of time after it just stopped booting up. So i'll be MIA until it gets back to me. I'm still contactable by email should anyone need to.

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