First up some honesty:. I reformatted my computer today and wiped out about 3 weeks worth of solid coding on my thesis. That pretty much makes me a dumb ass since I backed up everything else. Iv got some backups set up now and I’m going to get some sort of reliable, fast removable storage so this cant happen again.

Recently events have also conspired to push back my thesis defense until mid February. This is more time than I felt I needed to have a demo of the prototype ready. So given the slightly relaxed time table and my current set back I thought now would be a good time to take a step back and really consider what’s important on this project. I’m being too much of a perfectionist about things. I need to prioritize just a few things that need to be done the right way and let the rest slide.

Grouper is as close as anyone has gotten to the idea behind Mindshare. I’m sure that I could convince lots of my friends to use that, especially for swapping photos. I am also encouraged that it took a whole team of ex AIM developers to put that together. As the sole developer its hard feel that you are making any progress.

There are good things to be said for non collaborative sharing, like better control of your bandwidth. In the end Mindshare will support both kinds of sharing, thats actually what I wanted from the start. Mindshare will still enable you to do things you cant do with Grouper. Real collaboration takes cohesion and Mindshare gives groups a way to express themselves cohesively. Without a working prototype its hard to tell how users will respond to that idea so I will be following Grouper to see how well it is accepted.

Distributed BitTorrent is exactly what Mindshare will need for a back-end file transfer engine. Every peer will be its own ‘tracker’. For now though the tradeoff is speed of implementation vs transfer speed. BitTorrent is a proven technology but implementing it in Mindshare is a big risk in the next few months. It is obviously the right thing to do for performance reasons but it might break my time budget. The prototype will have a very simple file transfer engine that can be improved later. Better to have something quick and than something I am forced to abandon at the last second.

Winamp will soon succumb to bit rot. Sad but true, the last of the Winamp developer staff has followed Justin Frankel in leaving Nullsofts offices for greener pastures. This leaves AOL free to do as it must with the Winamp player. I have personal used Winamp for as long as I’ve had MP3′s and a computer to play them. I have also aggressively evangelized the program to others as a good replacement for Windows Media Player and Real Audio. I could never recommend Winamp 3 to anyone but Winamp 5 has gone far beyond those issues. It can play video and is a much nicer user experience that Windows Media Player. I just hope that AOL wont pervert a good thing to the point where I can no longer recommend it or use it myself.

Serious work got underway on the port of the BEEP Echo demo to JXTA today. I had a swarm of JXTA clients up and running and finding each other by the end of the day. This is p2p echo so each client is also an echo server. Each echo peer actively searches for other echo peers and prints a list of these for the user. The user can then interactively select a peer and run echo against that peer.

JxtaNetMap absolutely rocked for debugging. I could see my peers, their location on the network and actually observer network instability as it happened. The only thing that sucked was having to build it from CVS to make it work. Yet another powerfull ingredient in the JXTA ‘special sauce’, good stuff.

The next step is to test out the new JXTA BEEP session creator I’ve built. The idea being that a JxtaSocket should behave like any regular Socket once a connection is established. So for minimal work BEEP should run over JXTA :-). All in all a good days work.

Photos of the hurricane will be forthcoming as soon as my web-host gets their ImageMagick configuration set up correctly :-/.

I spotted this cool photo blog. It does everything a well behaved photo section should do so go check it out. The best part is the Jonathan has gone to the trouble of explaining how its done over at photojunkie.org. I’m going to work on a version for waves so that I can mix photo entries in with normal entries. Hopefully this gets done today so I can post some hurricane photos.