Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Google Summer of Code - 2009

The final deadline for applications for the gsoc is fast approaching. You now have 4 days left, right up until 19:00 UTC on April 3rd. There are so many cool projects available this year, so make sure you apply soon before they're all taken!

Some of my personal favourites would be:
Writing SIMD code in C#
VDPAU VC-1/H.264 Support
Codec Demuxers
A Dirac decoder

And many more! Funnily enough, video encoding is what got me interested in programming in the beginning, so if you students don't snap up those projects, I will ;) Hack on something cool for the summer and earn yourself some cash while you're at it. It'll be great!

Sunday, March 22, 2009

We got the grand slam!



We've done it! We've won the Grand Slam for the first time in 61 years. It was the most nail-biting match I've watched in a while. It was so close that the result was actually down to the very last kick of the match, which was a penalty awarded* against Ireland. Thankfully Wales missed it and sealed Irelands victory.

Go on the green!

* The ref made a bad call here and awarded a penalty against Ireland because the ball bounced forward after it was dropped. The rule are pretty clear that this should be a scrum and *not* a penalty. It wasn't the first time he made that mistake either. Still, it didn't matter in the end, woo!

Update: A friend just told me that the ref originally signalled a scrum but then changed it to a penalty. Sounds like an irish guy mouthed off or did something off the ball. Did anyone notice what actually made him change his mind?

Friday, March 20, 2009

MonoTorrent 0.70

With all the excitement going on, I forgot to blog about MonoTorrent 0.70, so here's a belated summary of what went on:

* Fixed an issue for torrents with no trackers
* Optimised the Bitfield class to allow for higher performance piece picking
* Rewrote the piece picking API which resulted in a very extensible, easily testable, less buggy and faster implementation
* Fixed an issue where the announce wouldn't happen immediately after a torrent completes
* Fixed several issues with webseeding and rate limiting
* Fixed an issue which resulted in an incorrect encryption level been chosen in a small proportion of cases
* Ensure that announces to trackers always time out correctly
* Fixed a race condition when stopping a torrent while an incoming connection is being processed
* Increased the performance of disk IO so that hashing a torrent is about 10% faster
* Vastly improved performance of the BanList parser
* Fixed issue where fast pieces could be requested multiple times
* Fixed issue with selective downloading where the start/end indices of files could be offset by 1

A precompiled binary can be found here and the source tarball can be found here. Enjoy!

Sunday, March 15, 2009

What does it take to download a torrent?

The simple answer to this question is "All you need is the .torrent file. Stupid n00bs." This is true. The .torrent file contains all the metadata required to A) download the data and B) verify the data. Without this, you can't really do anything. So, do you actually need the .torrent file to begin a download?

No! All you need is the infohash for the .torrent file! The infohash is the SHA1 hash of the metadata in a .torrent file. As such, it can be used as a unique identifier for a particular .torrent file. With this infohash, you can query the BitTorrent DHT for a list of peers downloading that torrent. Then, with the help of the Metadata Exchange extension, you can connect to these peers and request that they send you the metadata from the .torrent file and you're away and downloading. Great!

"But what if some malicious peer sends you corrupt metadata, then you'd never be able to download the torrent properly!", I hear you asking. Well, in a rather beautiful twist, this is next to impossible. As I said earlier, the infohash is generated by putting the metadata in the .torrent file through a SHA1 hash. So all you have to do is hash the metadata once you have received it and then compare the result of that to the SHA1 hash you used to start the download. If they match, then you can be fairly confident that the metadata has not been corrupted/altered in any way.

As of 17:00GMT, March 15th MonoTorrent has completed its first download using only a 20 byte hash to begin the download. This is possible because of some tireless work by Olivier Dufour, who also implemented Peer Exchange, a good few parts of DHT, WebSeeding and SuperSeeding. The code for this still hasn't quite hit SVN, a bit of refactoring remains to be done. It should be in SVN within a week. I'm looking forward to his next patch of awesomenesss now.

Monday, March 02, 2009

The monsoon-devel list

I've started a mailing list for monsoon so that packagers can be kept updated and various interested people can post questions and all that jazz. Basically it's the standard -devel mailing list. That's mostly why it's called "monsoon-devel" ;)

If you're interested in keeping up to date on Monsoon, please join the group at: http://groups.google.com/group/monsoon-devel

Hit Counter