When I found OpenVPN, I thought it was the best and easiest VPN I had seen. However, it still requires very long configuration and port forwarding behide NAT. Luckily, it is able to run over TCP to prevent problems caused by NAT. Today, I found alternative promising solution called Hamachi. It states that it offers LAN over Internet with zero-configuration VPN and secure peer-to-peer technology. Amazing!

Long time ago, I used BTQueue for massively downloading large amount of files automatically by crawling trackers periodically. Then I got a problem due to duplicate filename, e.g., AVSEQ01.DAT or MUSIC01.DAT. This problem was caused by users who didn’t rename filename to what it should be. In addition, BTQueue have never asked destination directory, filename, or directory name because I designed it for fully automatic downloading. Interactive actions must not be used here at all. At that time, I solved this problem by automatically renaming that files to somewhat unique. However, this feature disappeared since BTQueue 0.1.0. Now, it’s time to solve it again.

According to Blognone Tech Day #1, I recorded most presentations by a video camera because I didn’t have enough space for real-time recording directly to harddisk. Now, it’s time to capture those videos to digital format. Unfortunately, my video camera is a bit too old. It is completely analog technology with poor quality USB port for emulating video capture device in MS Windows. So, to get the highest quality video, I have to use video capture card. What I have is LifeView FlyVideo 2000.

Drupal is becoming more popular this year. One of noticeable sign is security vulnerability report. During this year, Drupal already officially reported 8 advisories. The last two advisories was announced yesterday via e-mail followed by a post on the web. Fortunately, upgrading to Drupal 4.7.2 is very easy. Just to run a single command as below.

cvs update -d -P -r DRUPAL-4-7

Assuming that you are a part of large-scale international collaboration. In this collaboration, you are focusing on analyzing large amount of data. To read the data efficiently, the data should be stored as near as your computer. By the way, parties locate on different network and different country. As a result, the data must be mirrored from the origin server to each party dedicated server. There are so many options to satisfy this requirement. For example, rsync and mirror. Anyway, both tools do not scale well for big network. We are talking about content distribution problem that initially there are only one complete source. BitTorrent fits in this situation perfectly.

I developed BTQueue especially for running in pure text mode without any graphical interface to make it easy to run on any machines (mostly Linux). So you are able to add new metadata by given URL. However, there are so many private trackers around this world. BTQueue can’t access to the given URL of private trackers directly due to unauthentication problem. As a result I added wget and wpost commands for a year.