Related link: http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/2003/11/30.html#a1046

For some reason, about two months ago I woke up thinking BitTorrent was important. I’d heard it mentioned a few times over the previous few weeks and somewhere in the back of my brain something clicked. So I downloaded a BitTorrent client or two (currently, I’m using Shadow’s experimental BitTorrent client), visited a torrent site or two, and realized a few things:

1. This is, as Tim Bray pointed out, a gamechanger. Right up there with RSS if you ask me.
2. The various DRM people might just have a point. There’s no justification for legislation like the DMCA but the level of “It’s digital, I’ll share it” out there is scary.
3. I’ve led a very sheltered life. Some of the stuff that’s available out there is just really incomprehensible to me (as in Go away, Japanese id! You are scary! I am scared of you!).

So I did some brief investigation of BitTorrent, read the protocol spec, wiped the files from my hard drive, and let the matter lie. Today, I planned listen to the alarm bell in my brain, investigate it some more, and then post a summary.

Only to find out Dave Winer and Don Park posted articles on BitTorrent today (apparently, someone dropped a meme in the water supply again). In addition, Nelson Minar’s been covering the story like white on rice (side-note: I’m also gonna be really interested in his wine cellar software).

I don’t have much to add to what they’re saying, but I’d encourage you to check BitTorrent out. This, or something like it, is going to be a key component of the web of the future.

Got a favorite BitTorrent site?

Related link: http://www.sleepless.com/pocoman/

One of the questions I occasionally wonder about is: how do new consumer software companies get started? From a technical point of view, the capabilities that Moore’s law, modern operating systems and things like the Java Virtual Machine (or the Common Language Runtime) provide ought to make this the golden age of consumer software.

I think it’s now easier for small groups of people to write, qa, and ship high-quality software than ever before. And yet it seems like, at least relative to what’s possible, there aren’t a lot of new companies being formed (or are there? Does anyone have any statistics or references for this?).

One possible reason is that marketing to consumers, the sheer act of rising above the noise level and getting people to notice your software (or getting your software into the right distribution channels) is both very hard and not the sort of thing that the people who found small software companies are likely to be good at.

The people at Sleepless Software decided to give away the game and then, once you’re hooked, sell you a cheat sheet.
It’s an interesting twist on selling the documentation or selling the support.

And the game is fun too.

Related link: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.cl-http/74

My friend Peter points to a post from the Howard Dean camp, looking for Lisp programmers to hire. Peter, for whom I once threatened to print business cards with the title, “Overengineer,” proudly proclaims, “I know who I’m voting for!” For me, this may be the close-parenthesis on my confidence in Dean….okay, not really. But I do think it’s good for a chuckle. Has the Dean camp been infiltrated by one of Karl Rove’s minions, sneakily bringing down their Internet fundraising success with a poison pill?

Related link: http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/09/24/readable_java.html

Stephen Jungels wrote an interesting article on syntax problems in JDK 1.5. In it, he proposed an interesting variant on Generic syntax using parentheses instead of angle brackets. That is, his syntax replaces code like expurgate(Collection<String> c) with code like expurgate((String) Collection c) and the angle brackets after Collection became a cast before Collection.

He listed a lot of reasons why he prefers his syntax. Most of his reasons seemed unconvincing to me, to be honest. And the fact that Java generics look like C++ templates counts as a big win for me (it starts my intuition going in the right direction).

But recently I’ve discovered, there’s a huge argument against angle brackets syntax:

Generics Code isn’t HTML or XML

Sounds stupid, right? What I’m complaining about is simply that cutting and pasting angle-brackets code into a web page, or into many instant messaging clients (I’m using AIM 5.3.2392 and I can’t send generics code in a chat session), or into a wide variety of e-mail readers, is broken. A lot of devices, when confronted with <T extends Rentable> render it as blank.

So I don’t like Stephen’s syntax. But I really wish I didn’t have to use amperandltsemicolon all over the place when I want to IM about a piece of code either.

Do you ever IM or e-mail code? How do you get around problems with the clients?

Related link: http://www.3m.com/market/office/postit/com_prod/psnotes/

Warning: this is (sort of) a review of a Windows program.
If you’re not using Windows, you might not be interested.

Ever since I decided to write a shareware application, I’ve been much more experimental in my use of software. I download more, I test more, I use more programs than ever before.

In itself, that’s kind of strange. It sounds really stupid when I say it out loud, but I never really thought of software as being for end-users (part of the downside of doing server-side software on a daily basis I guess). I used to have a very fast machine with very little software and an empty hard drive. Now I have lots of little programs scattered all over the place, doing whatever it is they do.

There’s a lot of really interesting software out there. Some of it is very cool and almost pointless (the 3D desktops spring to mind). And some of it is very simple, and very useful. And there’s a lot of skill and creativity out there. If anyone can figure out how to build a genuine marketplace for software (so that any three developers can go off and innovate without completely abandoning their safety net), the world is going to change dramatically.

One of the coolest (and simplest) programs I’ve run across recently is from 3M (yep; they do software). It lets me put yellow sticky notes on my desktop.

That may not seem like much, and it isn’t, but it’s a very useful thing. I used to keep 5 or 6 instances of notepad open that I would basically use as transient storage. I would cut and paste into the right notepad, or quickly type something down. And then, later on, I would go searching among all the instances of notepad on my taskbar to find the right one.

Now I just keep my yellow stickies tacked to the desktop. It’s much nicer (especially since some of the stickies have alarms on them).

I like this program. I’m using the free version and it’s convenient.

What small, kind of unknown, programs do you use on a daily basis?

Related link: http://www.jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/review/jsr175/

JSR 175, the metadata specification, is now in public review. It’s been talked about for years, it was the topic of multiple JavaOne sessions, and it’s a big step forward (or, at the very least, a big change) coming down the pipe for “Tiger” (which, for some reason, I still think of as “Java 1.5″).

What did you find interesting or surprising about it?

Related link: http://www.sdforum.org/SDForum/Templates/Calendar.aspx?pid=179&sid=1

Next week, SDForum is putting on two talks related to privacy.
First, on Tuesday, the Emerging Technology SIG will feature Florian Pestoni (from IBM) who will give an overview of Digital Rights management. Then, on Wednesday, the Security SIG will feature Seth Schoen, from the EFF, giving an overview of Palladium followed by Whitfield Diffie talking about the field of information security.

I’m very proud of what we’re doing, and I hope you find the time to stop by.

Related link: http://www.proteron.com/kelbysnotes/

I ran across this today and was floored. Not by the implementation, but by the idea: plug-ins to applications (in this case, a shareware plugin for photoshop) that provide help information for users.

In a way, this is an obvious idea. The help that ships with application is often less than helpful. And the manuals often aren’t any better (not that I’m complaining. The computer book industry is alive and well, in part, because software publishers aren’t particularly good at documenting things). So why not use the existing plugin mechanisms to provide help?

But, then again, I’ve never seen anything explicitly do this before (have I just been missing out on a huge chunk of the software industry). And even though it now seems like an “of course people do that,” I wouldn’t have thought of it (simply because my mind is grooved to think of extensions as providing features, not commentary).

I don’t have a lot more to say; I just think it’s a very good, and different, idea.

What other clever uses of plug-in mechanisms have you seen?