vendredi 6 juin 2003

'Acquisition' acquired: OS X peer-to-peer software comparison Best of the bunch: Acquisition 0.92. That's my conclusion after almost a week of testing out the several file-sharing utilities for OS X announced last Saturday. Limewire may well be somebody's "chance to help promote an Open Protocol and the Digital Commons", as their site proclaims. But it sure isn't mine. My apologies to the developers, but despite the "important changes" in the version released on April 21, it falls so far short of doing anything for me that it ended up in the trash. "If it's not Limewire, then what else are you gonna use? There's no real competition, so Limewire will continue to be terrible until there is," thinks somebody called ox4dboy at VersionTracker. Wrong. Acquisition, which has an excellent interface, works by logging on to Limewire "Ultrapeers" among others, but with one important difference: it swiftly and successfully locates and downloads files of all conceivable kinds. My 15 bucks went to developer David Watanabe without hesitation, his work well worth every cent. Update 8 June: David dealt with an Acquisition registration problem. (I'd complained about the nag-panel that pops up frequently, but my registration number arrived with a nice note.) Direct Connect, from NeoModus, may well still be in a preview version, but it's a darned good one (and they do Windows too). I've little to add to what I've already said, but for the clarification that it works -- and well -- by giving you an extensive list of user "hubs" to choose from, categorised by those users themselves, and whence you can browse what you want and fetch it. The categories are pretty loose and one or two of the hubs will deny you access unless you're prepared to share 3 GB or more of your own files, which is certainly not my case. The one big drawback is that when it comes to music files, you have no idea of the quality of what you're getting until it's landed. Acquisition, by contrast, tells you all you need to know in advance. Neo's description of itself as a "sort of" KaZaA client for Mac scarcely does justice to Michael Thole's remarkable piece of work (the link, this time, take you to his complete software offerings page). Aware of the very large number of potential KaZaA hosts out there, in the latest version of Neo, Michael starts you off with a choice of 16 (by my count, not 10 as his notes say) "super-servers". They're all, going by their names, in the United States. You then have an option to pick any of these and build a "Master List" from it, which can consist of anything between 25 and 2,500 servers (a range of choices in the preferences). As I write, I've opted for the largest I've tried yet (with eight other applications open, five of them internet ones, on a cabled eMac (512 kb/s). At a busy time on a Friday evening, Neo has taken 26 minutes to scan 859 hosts, where I've just stopped it, got 4 refusals, 28 timeouts, 75 not found, 23 "other errors" -- and 703 operational hosts offering 197574 files. For "purely " purposes, you understand, I've selected Audio, typed in one of Marianne's favourite words at the moment (if not always mine after nearly a day of it once): Korn. It's just downloaded one of a choice of almost 50 mp3s at a perfectly satisfactory average 23 kps (and has done far better than that). As with Direct Connect, not knowing whether you're getting a high-quality mp3 or a mediocre one till it's done is currently a disadvantage. But Direct Connect is free and Neo donationware by a very bright student at an Indiana university. I shall make a donation. Both Acquisition and Neo run good user forums, and one part of Michael's is devoted to how to add more IP address net ranges to choose from. There's even a bunch in France - discussed in French, where some people have got the hang of it and others are still trying... At NeoModus, developer Jon Hess also maintains help, FAQ and news pages. Out of five ¤: Acquisition: ¤¤¤¤ Neo: ¤¤¤½ Direct Connect: ¤¤¤ Limewire: ¤ 6:54:44 PM  link   your views? [] Petty problems in perspective A couple of nights ago, 56 e-mails landed. Only 37 of them were spam. So yesterday, it was time to add all the important ones to the handful in my 'A = priority' box and set about the replies. Well into the process, my internet connection suddenly went down. After the usual checks, it was decidedly dead. "Dammit," I thought, "the modem's finally had it." After all, the poor thing's been a dust collector under the desk for years, and the gentle attention its various vents get from the vacuum cleaner is probably little compensation for many unintended kicks and occasional use as a footrest until I realise I'm doing this. But no. My cable ISP, Noos, was this time round kind enough to leave a message on their "robo-phone" service relatively early into the overpriced "which button to push" call, explaining that the technical problem was theirs. This was thoughtful. While they're on the whole an excellent ISP, the "infos réseaux" (network maintenance reports) they put on their website usually bear no apparent relation to reality. Because Paris Métro lines often run straight down under streets propped up on an alarming series of subterranean arches, my wicked thoughts turned instantly to the men who have taken more than a week simply to smash the old stairs at the Pernety station almost opposite "the canteen". Lord knows what else they're doing down in the bowels of the earth. The pneumatic drills that have run almost incessantly have not been good for business at the Pizzeria Pernety (PP). After all, it's no time of year to close the windows and door. This comes on top of the lengthy closure (mini-brickbat n°4) of a station which is usually an outlet for hordes of mainly American and German tourists in summer, spy the PP and decide that it looks like a good place to go. Yesterday, I sat with one of the other regulars and we watched the clouds of fine dust drifting over the plates of people actually sitting outside, in their insanity, at the bar across the road, which has seen a whole series of ill-fated owners, most of them perfectly miserable even when they arrived. I know little of exactly what happens when the Parisian summer pastime of deploying teams either to tear up streets (which reaches its peak in August) or to bury themselves underneath them for days, except that these people do sometimes cut things they shouldn't. Like pipes, lines and cables. As for the current wave of strikes, the foreign media have given up trying to explain what they're about. The same is now true of almost of all the local press, apart from 'Le Monde' or economic journalists in other papers, who I can't understand anyway. All I do know is that Tony (76, hero of Odessa Street) successfully made it both to Switzerland and back on major strike days. And all I can do is bow in admiration. If it were not so unkind to such family as he has there, I would tell you that on his triumphant return, he informed me that this latest trip has not "changed [my] mind. Switzerland is the most boring country in Europe and possibly the world." zzz Anyway, most of the mail has now gone. Losing part of my computer's abilities for a few hours was a minor hassle -- though you'd scarcely believe such things are trivialities if you bother to read the paroxysms of rage a handful of my friends kick up when similar things happen to them. Particularly Americans, it so happens, because their "business culture" is so good at service that it drives some of them potty if it stops. My other petty complaint is about salts. Body salts. I've written so many stories about African ailments with diarrhoea as a symptom that I slapped my head with stupidity when blog-hero (Dr Luc) Yang reminded me that I was currently daily emptying my own system of essential nutrients. The cheapest I have yet found come from Nestlé and are exactly the same thing as doctors give to babies in Africa and Asia. Here, a packet of 10 sachets costs nearly nine euros, which is bloody expensive! They're not reimbursed by the Sécu -- but that's no bad thing because one sensible step successive governments have taken is to see a whole host of pharmaceutical products removed from the list of those covered by social security. France has one of the world's best welfare systems and this kind of action, in favour of key "generic products", is one of the ways of ensuring we can just about afford to keep it that way. zzz Rather here than Zimbabwe. I remain in touch with a lovely friend whose name I cannot disclose. When things seem "rough" here, it helps to take a look at some of the things she tells me. She won't object to me sharing this much, which arrived a week ago: "Due to the vagaries of Zim's electricity supply, can't read you every day but catch up when I can. We have two power cuts a day now -- of several hours -- happily timed to coincide with breakfast and dinner. No water for several hours in the middle of the day and a very dodgy phone line. Cash a very big problem entailing shady deals (in the dark -- literally) and dashes home with bundles of the stuff terrified of being hi-jacked. Just waiting for the mayhem next week. But will it really happen? That is the big question..." As indeed it was. The Beeb's among those keeping regular tabs on it all, my friend. During the week, they even saw fit to bother domestic audiences again with your troubles. A brief interruption to the constant babble about Iraq. There was a nice one too: the twerp of a US general who announced that even though nobody's yet found WMD, they did get rid of the biggest one in the country: Saddam Hussein. This morning, we learned that the regime in Baghdad has no intention of letting UN weapons inspectors go where they want to go. Yeah. So what else is new? There was a little something. After several years in Nigeria, friend Peter is writing a book on the place which he hopes will prove a success, as do I. While there, he often got exercised about the world's indifference to Africa. I thought he was exaggerating with some of his outbursts. Until recently. The Beeb (again) this week interviewed a bunch of people off the streets in Britain in a haphazard bid to find out what "ordinary folk" know of the place. The only response that really had my jaw drop came from the man who earnestly explained why he couldn't understand there being a famine in the Horn of Africa. "I thought we had sent enough money to solve that," he said, "with Band Aid!" OK, I will state the obvious. Though I doubt many people think like that fellow. Let's assume Band Aid did raise $144,124,694 over the years as that site says. Today that's 122 398 890.87 euros. I don't know how much it costs to get a sachet of Nestlé's Alhydrate salts to an Eritrean village. But here, that would buy me 142,656,050 daily sachets. Just for me... $144 million went a long way, didn't it? Of course, I'm not knocking Band Aid. Far from it. But let's keep things in perspective. 1:03:43 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.