What is P2P and why is it the best and worse thing to happen to the Internet

I live on the west coast and I subscribe to the New York Times as do thousands of others around me. Imagine for a moment that every night the paper was printed in New York, loaded onto a truck (along with the papers for everyone else) and they were all sent out onto the highway. The Times would need to have thousand and thousands of trucks and they would need to have huge highways into and out of their facility to accomodate all that traffic. The costs would be enormous and the chances of getting my paper to me on time would be low (lots of delays because of traffic congestion, failures and such).

People who know how these papers work know that instead, one electronic copy of that paper is sent to a local printer in Washington and thousands of copies are printed locally and delivered to homes quickly. This model also exists on the internet today and is called the "Content Distribution Network" model. When you watch that youtube video or download that iTunes music, you are actually retrieving a copy that is stored on a server that may be very close to you, This saves all kinds of bandwidth and is a necessecity for those companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple and others who send lots of data. The comanies who provide this service are wildly profitable and get away with charging alot for their services. Yesterday one of these companies (Limelight Networks) went public and their stock was bid up almost double in the first hours of trading.

Returning to the newspaper analogy for a minute, suppose all of us and our neighbors had a printing press in our houses and were able to download and print the Times. While we were doing this, our neighbors were also downloading the paper. If we knew we needed the sports and business section, and our neighbor had them, it would be much better for us to get those sections from them rather than downloading them from a server far away. Imagine we has hudreds of neighbors all offering a page of the paper as soon as they get it, and you will begin to understand Peer to Peer (or P2P). Today this technology is wildly popular among the music and video sharing folks. If you connect to the "bittorrent" P2P network, you can download virtually any music, TV, Movie or software you can imagine. These files are all stored on your neighbors coputers and you pull a small bit from each of them. Sharing uses a small bit of their network connection in the "up" direction, but most of us use very little of that bandwidth today; if you are like me, the only up traffic is the clicks you make to request web pages and the emails you send out. All the other traffic is in the down direction.

Today, P2P protocols are uncrontrolled and you don't really share only with your close neighbors... you are sharing with a vast group of "neighbors" all over the world. The result is that traffic doesn't stay in your neighborhood, but it bounces all across the network. According to studies, almost 60% of the traffic on the Internet backbone trunks is P2P file sharing, and most of that is video. This is more than all the email and web browsing traffic combined! And this is really being generated by a small set of the Internet users (i.e. Bittorrent users). Imagine what the world looks like when the old folks start using P2P.... the net will be crushed.

What is needed is a managed P2P that can ensure that local traffic is really delivered locally. It would also be great if the applications could make effective use of their neighbors to ensure fast reliable delivery. Add onto that the ability for content producers to protect their content (i.e. you can't share that movie you bought with someone who didn't buy it), support realtime live video and the ability to insert targeted ads and you'll see what Rinera Networks is setting out to build.

Cool... Compressed Air Car - 200 Km on a fill

An Interesting Article on a car being tested in India that runs on a tank of compressed air. Top speed is 68 MPH.

Hmmm... perhaps this is how 1 billion Chinese will get behind the wheel...

The worlds smallest mountain range

Last week we drove from Washington down to the Bay Area. The drive is long but filled with interesting features along the way. One area I always find interesting is the California Central Valley. On this drive you enter the valley from the north end and follow US 5 on a straight southern path.

The valley route follows the Sacremento River from it's headwaters (in the town of Mount Shasta) and passes sheep and cow ranches, nut trees, olive trees, fruit orchards and miles and miles of the most fertile rice paddies in the US. This time driving down the sky was filled with smoke from the seasonal burning of the rice fields.

As you look east across these fields you can see the smallest mountain range in the world, the Sutter Buttes. Last week the NY Times ran an article about these hills and the efforts to create a state park around them ( they are completely private owned today). The article tells about the volcanic upwelling that created the range independant of the Sierra or Coastal mountain ranges.

Social Networks and the "Luck Factor"

So lately most of my posts have been about Flickr and my project to digitize and make available old pictures. Flickr has interesting capabilities because it is more a "social Networking" site than a picture site. Flickr is attempting to pull together communities linked through pictures.

There are a number of other sites attempting to do similar things; linking people together based upon sports or music or politics. This is part of what people are calling "Web 2.0"; the ability to use the network infrastructure to tie people and information more closely together.

The other social networking site that I make most use of is called Linked In. This site allows me to connect and maintain contact with people I've worked with at previous jobs. It is useful as a Rolodex because when a person changes jobs or email addresses their updates are automatically published to all their contacts. For people like me who are job hunting, there are two great aspects to the site; Recommendations and Introductions. LinkedIn gives me a place to record and publish recommendations from colleagues. If you take a look at my Linked In Profile you will see a number of recommendations that I've gotten; in one step I can point prospective employers to these. Using the Introduction tools, when I have a position I am interested in, I can search LinkedIn for people who work at that company (preferably someone like the VP of Ops in my case) and see if anyone in my network of contacts knows that person (and would be willing to make an introduction).

I'm currently reading a book called The Luck Factor: The Four Essential Principles which attempts to break down the elements of what people characterize as a "Lucky" life. The premise is that luck is not some sort of supernatural blessing, but it is the result of actions, both conscious and unconscious. This premise made complete sense to me; Looking back on the times when I've made lucky or fortunate choices, there was really much more planning, thought and intuition involved than "luck"

The author is a psychologist and studies a population of people who characterized themselves as either Lucky or Unlucky. To make a long story short, he distilled his observations down to this; Lucky people are generally Open, Extroverted and Relaxed (as opposed to neurotic) which results in more opportunities to build and stay connected with a large network of friends, to be open to new opportunities and be relaxed and confident enough to recognize the opportunities and take them.

The first principal he identifies is that "Lucky" people build and maintain a large and vital network which is the first step on the road to "luck". In reading this, the comparisons to LinkedIn and the functions it fills were obvious. Building and maintaining a healthy network of connections is one of the building blocks to a "lucky" break.

Buggy Whips and VHS rewinders

Who remembers these places:

Time once was when we would make monthly trips to drop off a roll or two of film and wait a week or so for it to get developed and returned. The time between taking the pictures and getting them back could be weeks (or months if you forgot a roll in the camera). Then, once we got the pictures back we'd stick them in an album and look at them on rainy days or holidays.

Fast forward to today and we're all running mini development labs on our PC's. As I work to cleanup and edit pictures I took 25 years ago I wonder what the 1980 me would think of the 2007 me. Even more, what will the 2027 me be doing that we can't even imagine today (hopefully not pushing up the daisies :)

Photoshop is pretty cool...

The negative scanning project has impressed me me with the power of Adobe Photoshop Elements. The negatives that we are scanning have picked up a fair amount of scratches and discolorations over the years, despite us taking pretty good care of them. The following is how these flaws can be cleaned up to give the best possible image.

Here is a "before" image (click on this to give a a large view):



In Photoshop I tuned down the brightness of the image and cleaned up the white scratches. This was a tricky image because of the scratches on on her eye. Essentially you can edit pixel by pixel to recreate what was lost. It took about 15 minutes to fix this (the original is a much bigger picture and it was in bad shape)



Some notes on the scanner (Epson Perfection V700 Photo Color Scanner) and the images it produces; The device is capable of capturing up to 6400 DPI, but that resolution is beyond the grain on most of the negatives I'm working with. I have the capture set to 4800 DPI and 24 Bit color. I am also capturing these images in a raw, uncompressed format called "tiff". The result of this is a 35 Megapixel image that takes up about 110 Mb of disk space. To put this in perspective, most good digital cameras are 5 megapixel and capture images that are around 2 Mb. After editingthis raw image and saving it, I also save a copy as a JPEG image which is a compressed format easier to put up on the web. The whole process takes 8-10 minutes per image (depending on the severity of the scratches and how much effort I want to put into it).

I should note that the scanner has tools built into it to automatically do much of this scratch removal (called Digital ICE). I've used this a bit, but found that the results were not as good as I could achieve manually.

Why I'm moving my pictures over to Flickr

As part of the picture scanning project I'm working on, I've spent some time in the past few weeks looking at the various tools available on the web for storing and sharing pictures. Most of you are familiar with OFoto... that's where many of us upload and share pictures. OFoto works pretty good, but it has a few drawbacks that I don't like:

- I can't download pictures to use on my computer. Perhaps I
want to print one of Kevin's picture or use it in a card or
document, I can't do that
- I can't link to my OFoto pictures from somewhere else. In
order to see my pictures you need to log in, there is no other
interface for getting access to the image (what computer guys call
an API...)
- Because of the issues listed above, I am stuck viewing pictures
in that limited OFoto interface (and the pictures are too small to
really enjoy)

There is a photo sharing site called flickr.com that has become really popular, particularly because they fix exactly the problems called out above. I've been playing around with what it can do and I wanted to share it with you.

- First, take a look at my flickr site (http://flickr.com/photos/steveandsue/)

- Then click on any picture (here's one to try http://flickr.com/photos/steveandsue/394335199/)

- Then look at the largest view of that picture: (http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=394335199&size=l)

That rocks... I can also link to any of the size images directly from an email or blog and they let you download the large size right from that last page.

That's pretty cool, but the best part of Flickr is the API that they have developed. Because they are so open with sharing pictures, hundreds of programs are available to link in and use the pictures... If you go to my blog (http://stedanrac.blogspot.com/) you can see one example called a "badge" that rotates through the pictures.

But that isn't the coolest thing... If you do one tech thing this week, download and install this screensaver (note to Rachel... there is a Mac version there also). When you get it installed, you can point it to a set of flickr pictures. Posted below here is a detailed instruction page to help. Believe me, it is really cool and worth installing...

How to configure Mosaica screensaver

First, here is a link to the detailed instructions on how to install and configure Mosaica screensaver: http://blog.consta.de/mosaica/options/

To configure it to see my Flickr pictures, go into the screensaver config:

Click on the "Settings" button and enter steveandsue in the "User:" box as shown below

Futher options can be added by entering specific tags in the configuration. For example, if Rachel wanted to have a screensaver with only pictures of her, she could enter "Rachel" in the tags box

Whistling Past The Graveyard

As we find ourselves deep in the chaotic real estate market of 2007 we are getting a first hand picture of the state of the market here in Puget Sound. We're seeing houses (new and resale) going for strong prices and there aren't that many homes on the market right now (driving around you don't see too many signs).

Here is a quite from a somewhat upbeat article in yesterday's Seattle Times (Full text here).



WASHINGTON — The slump in housing deepened in the final three months of last year, with sales of existing homes falling in 40 states and median prices dropping in nearly half the metropolitan areas surveyed.

Although Washington state's sales of houses and condominiums declined 16 percent, prices continued to climb, thanks to a generally strong economy.

In the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area, prices rose 11.3 percent in the fourth quarter compared with a year earlier, the National Association of Realtors reported Thursday. Spokane prices were up 12.2 percent, and Portland up 11.2 percent.

Formerly red-hot areas were among the hardest hit as the five-year housing boom cooled considerably in 2006.

While some economists think the worst may be over for housing, others predicted more price declines to come in some areas until near-record levels of unsold homes are reduced.

The Puget Sound area is not now reporting an excess housing supply.

Ballmer Reacts to my Vista post!

Ballmer: Vista forecast too rosy
By Benjamin J. Romano
Seattle Times technology reporter

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer warned Wall Street analysts Thursday to dial down their assumptions of how much Windows Vista, the company's newly released operating system, would contribute to revenues next fiscal year.

New Years Resolutions

This year I made three resolutions; Save more money, Lose more weight and Read at least one book a month.

As I currently have no income, resolution #1 has been modified to "Spend Less Money"; let's not talk about resolution #2.... but Resolution #3 is well underway :^)

First up on the book parade was Chronicles by Bob Dylan This was an autobiography written in a unique (some may say incoherent) style. In the book, Dylan focuses primarily on two periods in Dylan's life; the early 1960's when he left Minnesota and landed in the streets of SOHO and Greenwich Village in New York City; and the very late 1990's when he attempted to revive his career after doing concert tours with the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty. One reason I read this book was an exhibit on his life we saw last year at the EMP (Experience Music Project in Seattle).

I found the sections on his early career to be the most interesting; his descriptions of breaking in to the folk coffeehouse scene in New York were full of interesting anecdotes. In one story he recalls his relationship with Woody Guthrie who he visited as he lived out his last months in a sanitarium outside New York. Woody told Bob that there was a box of unpublished songs in his basement he could have. Working off directions from Woody, Dylan took the bus upstate to find the house. He describes stumbling across a swampy field in the dark and arriving a at the home only to scare the hell out of the babysitter and a baby Arlo Guthrie. He never got those songs.

Dylan's love of Folk Music led him to the archives of the New Your Public library where he would comb through Civil War era newspapers to absorb the tenor of that time.

Dylan writes in a relaxed, conversational style that can be very engaging to read, but which can occasionally deteriorate into long and confusing sentences. I would also note that while his recall of conversations and events is part of what makes this an interesting book, but frequently the unbelievable level of detail he recounts makes you wonder how this boomer's brain cells survived the 60's so well.

Some computer advice

In the past few weeks I've had a few conversations with folks who were considering upgrading to Windows Vista because they thought it was bettter in some major way or that it fixed some significant security problems. I spent several months using the final version of Vista and have been following the recent press and thought I'd put some thoughts together for folks considering the upgrade.

While there are some pretty bells and whistles that make Vista look different, the majority of the new features are not things that you would normally interact with. Security and Product Licensing are the biggest changes. If you want to read Microsofts answer to "why Upgrade?" look here here.

When I was using Vista, the changes to security became very clear; almost any change to the system triggers a pop-up window asking the user to approve or disapprove. I can tell you from experience that it is next to impossible for the lay person to determine if all of these are appropriate (and there are a lot of these popups). The effect is to push the security problem back on the user, and the vast majority of users aren't prepared to handle these. I think this is a bad thing ( plus the popups are also numbingly annoying... see this Apple Ad for a hilarious example)

Vista will cost you extra, whether you buy the software disks or buy it on a PC. Vista requires more that twice the the ram (anything less that 1GB will feel real slow). Faster CPU and Graphics cards are also necessary.

One big reason for geeks to upgrade is that Vista is a 64 Bit operating system. If you've bought or built a high end PC in the last year or so you might have a 64Bit CPU. I did this on my home PC, but Vista won't improve my performance until the applications and drivers I use on the PC are also upgraded...

I would advise folks not to upgrade existing home machines to Vista. Keep Windows XP and make sure that you have good security features on it ( turn on Automatic Updates from Windows Update, get Anti-Virus (free) and a Firewall (also free)). Also, upgrade your browser to IE7 to get the new features and security availble there. If you are going to purchase a new machine you probably won't have a choice, but make sure you get the fastest processor and most memory (like 2 Gig) that you can afford.