Niall's Weblog

The world’s oldest known playable audio recording was in fact engraved on a lead cylinder sometime in 1878 or so. It was made by a man called Frank Lambert who also invented the typewriter. In any case, this very early recording is speculated to have been made as work towards building a talking clock. An [...]

To follow up on my last post on the bittorrent end-game, I’m going to write about a strategy to bootstrap a torrent download. I am talking here about the case where you start a download with no existing data, in other words, from scratch. As I described in one of my earlier articles about the [...]

Downloads in BitTorrent take place according to a number of strategies, which map to stages. Initiating a torrent download has one strategy, normal operation has another strategy, and finally pulling down the last remaining pieces has yet another strategy. The End Game is the name for the final download strategy – there is a tendency [...]

I’ve been making public releases of Unworkable, a simple and efficient from-scratch BitTorrent implementation written in C for a couple of months now. Prior to that, I had been working on it for about 18 months on and off. While I wouldn’t claim it to be highly successful at this early point, I make an [...]

One of the more interesting extensions to the BitTorrent protocol has been the introduction of a distributed hash table implementation. As mentioned in my previous article on the basics of the BitTorrent protocol, traditionally BitTorrent relies upon a centralised “tracker” application – which runs over standard HTTP – in order to facilitate contacting peers and [...]