Brennan’s Blog

The mod_bt extension for Apache 2 is currently in alpha release and development is moving forward. It is quite exciting what will happen once the Bit Torrent system is released to all Apache web servers. For starters it will mean that people will be able to host large files to be downloaded by thousands of people without overloading their bandwidth. Perhaps DSL and Cable Modem providers will allow home hosting at some point.

At this point the only significant files I would expect to use this bandwidth will be personal podcasts, or audio blogs. I am looking to start one with a few of the guys at work. For starters we will just pick a single topic and record a discussion of it for 5 minutes. And one of the guys is a musician so he will provide intro/exit music for our little show. I work for a company named SpiderLogic and the podcast will be called "The Eight Legs Podcast." I will simply host it as an RSS 2.0 enclosure with an mp3 file like most podcasts. Some popular podcasts already make use of Bit Torrent technology to spread the server load a bit. The iPodder software has Bit Torrent features incorporated into it's design.
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I am a bit late to the game, but after owning an iPod mini for a few months I have finally caught up with Podcasting. I just installed the iPodder software and started subscribing to podcasts. But what is a podcast anyway?

A podcast is an online radio show which you can automatically download to your computer and sync up to your mp3 player. The iPodder software automates all of the work which makes it so easy. Think of it as a Tivo for online radio. Anybody can produce their own show and publish it on the internet. And think of what you can do when you have no time constraints or the FCC monitoring it.

Another great feature of podcasts is that you can listen to them anytime you like. If you have a couple of favorite TV shows which are on at the same time you may have to choose which one you will watch, but with podcasts you do not have to choose and you can listen to a show when you are driving into work or while you are cooking yourself dinner.

[ Eight Legs Podcast ]
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Over the weekend I noticed my server was getting bogged down quite a bit and it turned out the MT installation was getting hit pretty hard. It seems an attacker was attempting to overload the system so that some comment spam could get in without sending me an email about the new comment. And it seems they got one comment in before I bounced the web server and renamed my MT comment script.

I use MT-Blacklist but that is just not blocking enough spam. So my co-worker James Roome was helpful enough to find a better solution by James Seng called Scode. It is in version 0.1 Beta, but I can adjusted it as needed and send changes back to him. I hope it helps.

I have set up a couple of blacklist features on this MT blogger to prevent comment spammers from getting their junk onto this website. We have all been annoyed by spam to our email inbox for a long time now and due to the popularity and ease of posting it has become common for automated spamming of blogs. It is easy to find blog sites simply by going to the sites which accept pings for feed updates. So it only made sense that these evil spammers would find a way to exploit it. But it seems there is a powerful way to stop them...
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I use the Netflix service to order 3 DVD movies in an endless cycle and up this weekend I had "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," "Punch-Drunk Love," and "Lost in Translation." Fortunately one of the three was worth the time to watch...
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I have put together a stylesheet for this blog which matches the previous designs that I have used in the past. What is different here is that I relying heavily on the stylesheet to control everything. The MovableType templates provide structural HTML with DIV tags with ID and CLASS attributes so that the CSS can be used to control positioning and the color and graphics.
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