My .NET Rocks! AAC AudioBook Format feed enclosure file all of a sudden had a .torrent extension, so I went to the .NET rocks site to see what was up.
First of all, nice
new site for .NET Rocks. Good job guys. Then I noticed the BitTorrent video from Carl Franklin and Geoff Maciolek,
a flash video on Carl's Pwop.com site covering a complete installation and use of the
Azureus BitTorrent client to download .NET Rocks and other bittorrent content.
A few of my thoughts on the video and on bitTorrent in general are
- After reading the January 2005 Wired article on Bram Cohen, I am a believer in BitTorrent. Dazzling technology.
- That said, I'm still uncomfortable opening up a port on my Linksys router, too uncomfortable to serve as an outgoing node for the present, I'm afraid. As the video demonstrated, however, you can still use BitTorrent without opening up a port and being part of the distribution swarm. So you don't have to open up a port.
- Why a Java client? As I've mentioned before, I don't do anything "fun" with my computers other than write code and blog about writing code. I also run Windows 2003 Server cause these machines to do work for HQ, so when I see that I have to load the Java JRE for any single app, its highly unlikely that the app will find a home on my hard drive. There are other BitTorrent clients out there, of course.
- Carl said they're going to make .NET Rocks only available by BitTorrent in the near future. I appreciate the bandwidth and economic savings issues, but I'll be missing a few .NET Rocks shows if that's the case...until I find a non-Java client. I don't think as a content provider and distributor you can force users to your model, unless you're serving up Deadwood episodes, perhaps.
In summary, a very beneficial 30-minute video well worth your time if, like me, you know about BitTorrent but haven't seen it in action.