Why does bittorrent + podcasting matter? (Or, “why open source?”) February 28, 2006
Posted by spanky in apple, Uncategorized.4 comments
Quite often, some of my friends and acquaintances don’t really think open source is something that they need to pay attention to, that it’s a quaint little hobby for tinkerers and doesn’t have a really large place in their day-to-day internet life. While I’ll be the first to admit that the products of the open source community are not a panacea, it is probably the only group that has nothing other than the satisfaction of end users in mind. Corporate entities, while often appearing benevolent, will inevitably limit choices or features, or use the product to further their own interests, be it building a user base, or mindshare, or whatever.
An example of this is Apple’s iTunes including PodCasting. It’s a double-edged sword; by making podcasting much easier to subscribe to, shows are getting much wider exposure and more listeners. The cost of this is that now Apple has a great deal of control over podcasters since they are now the point of entry for the listener base. If an RSS feed works with other podcast clients, but not with iTunes, the number of people who will subscribe to your show will drop precipitously. If, for whatever reason, your podcast doesn’t show up in the top/featured podcasts, you won’t get the coverage that a podcast that Apple features will. Apple has the mindshare and market clout, as well as the content delivery software in place to establish this hegemony on what was once a community-led phenomenon. Now, I’m not stupid. For Apple, this was an incredibly smart business move. While they may not have invented podcasting (i.e. the simple act of putting MP3 URLs into RSS) they get to become a primary supplier for the content. Why should you care? Simple. Without bittorrent, podcasting will not be able to scale well to a larger listener base. Already, a lot of my favorite podcasts are taking on sponsors and ads for revenue to offset bandwidth costs that keep rising. Podcasts are already recorded on sub-par equipment and downsampled and compressed to appallingly low file sizes to cut back on bandwidth spending, but if podcasting keeps growing, it won’t matter. If podcasters don’t start using bittorrent, small, independent people may not be able to attract and sustain a larger listener base. And I don’t see that happening unless iTunes supports it. This may not seem like a big deal, but I think the strength of podcasting lies in independence and free speech (like blogging). I just don’t want to see a day where Clear Channels and Time Warners move in and become the only game in town for podcasting.
Webcam Woes February 18, 2006
Posted by spanky in Linux.add a comment
I own a Logitech Quickcam Express I got for free with some promotion, and I’ve been trying to get it working with Kubuntu on my Powerbook to no avail. There’s a quickcam kernel module, which requires video4linux support, which I loaded. The problem may actually be USB-related, though I’m not sure yet. I spent an hour or two messing with it. When I tried this on my old and busted Gentoo box, it loaded up the modules, and worked right off the bat, so I’m not sure what’s going on. More later if I end up fixing it.
Optimizing Linux boot times and other kernel tuning February 5, 2006
Posted by spanky in carpc, Linux.add a comment
So as part of my CarPC project, I’m putting together a build of Linux that is very light and very fast. I didn’t start out with any particular distro or set of tools in mind. The hardware is one of the main project constraints, in this case a Duron 700 with a Riva128 (Thanks, Jon!) and a meager 128 MB of old and busted system memory.
I tried Damn Small Linux, which is a Knoppix-derived LiveCD build. It booted in about ~60 seconds from power on to X/fluxbox session accepting user input. It’s very fast, even on this system, but had a lot of quirks, and had all the disadvantages of a binary-only distro as well. Installing odd software and tweaking it is critical to my application, so this wasn’t really the direction in which I wanted to go.
Given that DSL wasn’t for me, there are two ways I could have gone. I’ve heard of people getting very fast boot times with Linux From Scratch, but that would involve building an entire distro from scratch, and having to probably install packages and such all by hand. It’d have all the advantages of a bottom-up approach, but may or may not be worth it in the end.
The second solution, which is what I’m trying now, is to do a top-down approach: install a bare Gentoo system, and pare it down to exactly what I need, and nothing more. I’m very familiar with the Gentoo install process (it still took forever, though), and yesterday I put together a working system. It went from power on to a terminal login prompt in about 45 seconds. I’ve made a lot of changes since then, the kernel is getting smaller at each recompile as I zero in on exactly what I need. Things I’ve used to help my boot time:
- Everything I need and only what I need are compiled directly into the kernel. No modules, I eliminated those module autodetect scripts from startup, and so forth. Definitely saves a few steps and at least 7 seconds.
- I noticed an inexplicable delay between the last init script starting and getting a login prompt. It’s gone away, what I *think* fixed it was changing an option in /etc/conf.d/rc that says whether or not Linux should save /dev to a tarball on shutdown and restore it on startup.
- I spent a bit of time trying to figure out why nvidia’s X drivers for the Riva128 weren’t working. I found a bit on some forums about their latest Linux driver breaking compatibility with their older cards, and that downgrading might help, but it’s really a moot point. X.org takes a decent amount of time to start up, and Xvesa takes about 1 second.
- There’s an option in /etc/conf.d/rc that allows some parallelization of bootup, but I don’t think it makes that much of a difference for a single-processor system (at least it doesn’t for me), but YMMV
Some links I found that I’ll be checking up on:
IBM Article on faster boot times
This is really sweet : Bootchart tells you where your system is spending time in the boot process. If it comes down to it, I’ll use this, though it may not be necessary.
Current boot: 25 seconds
Internet connection sharing on Linux (IP Masquerading on a Powerbook) February 2, 2006
Posted by spanky in apple, Linux.add a comment
So I left my PCI wireless card with Linux drivers at school, my wireless router is next to the TV and not a great place to setup a Linux box, and I want to install packages onto a Linux box I’m setting up. I recently put Linux on my Powerbook, so what is commonly termed “Internet Connection Sharing” is no longer as easy as it used to be, and is bound to be a pain in the ass.
Or is it?
To clarify, what I wanted to do was share my Powerbook’s wireless connection over its Ethernet port. There are quite a few good tutorials on setting up IP masquerading, but the only one I needed was here. I copied and pasted that script into init.d, made it executable, and ran it on the Powerbook. It checks for and loads modules that I’m sure are running already, changes some network settings, and then sets up the forwarding rules in iptables. Note that I had to change 2 lines in the script, since my external interface was eth1 (wireless) and my internal interface was eth0 (wired Ethernet). I ran that, set the IP address on the host Powerbook to 192.168.2.1, set the IP address on the client system to 192.168.2.2 (both via ifconfig) and then “sudo route add default 192.168.2.1″ to the client system, and done. Pings, DNS, it was all taken care of.
