Offering a file by BitTorrent

[Colin Brace]

On 1/24/07, Brian Fahrlander <brian at fahrlander.net> wrote:

> I've opened my share of tarballs- I'm sick of it. I'm tired of the
> 'pothole' you hit every time you "make install" to learn something
> is missing.

Ummm, the way you install a program is one thing, the kind of
interface it offers is another. rttorent may be a text-mode program
but 'sudo apt-get install rtorrent' (or the equivalent couple of
mouse-clicks in synaptic) is pretty harmless.

As for a GUI,  if your server is running X, you can also run ktorrent,
which offers an optional remote web interface plugin (still in beta).
It offers a set of very basic controls which enable you to manage your
seeds ( to use BT parlance) from one of your workstations. Alas, you
will have to download a CVS tarball and compile it to use this
particular feature; it hasn't made it into an official release yet.

If you are interested in going that route, the multi-protocol MLdonkey
may also be an option. MLdonkey runs as a daemon and has no native
interface; you control it by its web interface or by a set of telnet
commands. The MLdonkey debs are in in Universe.

> Is there any danger in parking the .torrent file in the same directory
> with the payload?

No, in fact  you need to make sure the your BT client will see the
.torrent file the next time it starts so it will load and start
sharing it automatically. This means storing it in the download
directory or wherever the client looks for active .torrent files.

> there are other seeds for this, but I've cleaned up the naming scheme
> and made it more Linux-friendly (spaces, apostrophes, etc) but the
> videos are all the same.

Are you say that someone has already started seeding these video
files? If so, you really should use their.torrent files and leave the
filenames as is, as quirky as they may be. This way, people who have
already downloaded the files (and are hopefully still sharing them)
will contribute to the download swarm.

> It makes no bones about saying, "Here, the church has been wrong
> for SO long..." as much as "Science doesn't understand this...".
> This guy, like me, sees nothing wrong in the "prototype" man, Adam,
> being based on "apes" at some point. He also uncovers how
> unscientific the well-known development-of-man sequence (monkey,
> ape, caveman, stock broker) sequence was, when it was published
> by Time Magazine in the 70's.

Science and religion are mutually exclusive; they offer two entirely
different perspectives on life. If you try to set one against the
other, you will inevitably fail. You can neither disprove science with
religion nor religion with science.  If you want to use the Bible to
provide moral compass in your life, be my guest, but if you want to
use that collection of 2000+ year-old myths and allegories to
interpret the natural world, you are barking up th wrong tree. The
findings of Richard Leakey can withstand the formidable scrutiny of
the Western scientific process; the book of Genesis cannot.

Leakey fit together a few pieces of the puzzle; others remained
unsolved. No doubt Western science cannot explain everything, but  we
secular children of the Enlightenment accept that; we don't need to
have an answer for everything. But you creationists can't; you want
explanations for all the complexity in the world, and you will settle
for embarrassingly puerile ones, like those offered by the Bible.

Why you even bring up creationism in a technical forum is beyond me;
after all, computers represent, for better or worse, the epitome of
rationalistic thinking. At a certain point, it begins to look less
like "faith" and more like sheer pigheadedness.

-- 
  Colin Brace
  Amsterdam