What I’ve Been Up To
Sunday, January 20th, 2008I’ve started back at school, now attending the University of Houston. I’m only taking 6 hours, as I’m just getting back to going to school again, it’s a new school, and I don’t want to overload myself. This leaves me with a lot of extra time on my hands, so I’ve taken a keen interest in learning PHP, specifically version 5.
There is a real beauty behind PHP in how it works and the actual power behind the language. It’s an extremely powerful language, it’s fast, open source and with a programming background, the learning curve is simple - all great reasons to use it. Also, I believe in the next couple of years, we’ll be seeing a lot of applications that we use everyday going online, to be completely web-based. We’ll also see a increase in web-based storage solutions - where you’ll be able to access your information anywhere with an Internet connection. The drawback on this is that your information no longer becomes exclusively yours, which is a major privacy concern.
However, with everything going web-based, that is where PHP comes in. I was familiar with it previously, and could read and understand it, but coding it would be a challenge. Now, I find that since I’ve been hosting the Shareaza Daily Builds, I’ve gone from having multiple scripts to incorporating everything into one script using functions and sessions. It’s been quite fun actually, while being a learning process, and reminds me of the days of when I used Visual Basic 6. Once I get the Daily Builds script perfected, I’m going to release it under the GPL v3. While I haven’t gotten to a point or project where I’m incorporating databases and MySQL, that’s on my future agenda.
I’ve also been working closely with Greg Hazel, one of the lead developers of uTorrent. While I’m not going to go into specific details, I will say that version 1.8 is progressing nicely and will definitely be a recommend upgrade on final release. Using Visual Studio 2008 on debugging this project and learning the inner-working of Shareaza has been a pleasure.
Having been a developer in the peer-to-peer and Internet scene for several years, from a few years at PeerGuardian, working at a web-design company, to now working with Shareaza and helping with uTorrent, it’s been very interesting to see the progress and direction that peer-to-peer is going in. I strongly believe that in the next few years, we’ll see an increase in hardware appliances and applications using some sort of peer-to-peer protocol to deliver information. Along with this happening, we’ll see an increase in broadband speeds, moving to wideband speeds, throughout the United States.
I was asked an interesting question the other day, about what I thought about the sharing of illegal, inappropriate or questionable material online. My response is that with the recent events of things such as mandatory filtering throughout Australia and talks of AT&T filtering copyrighted material at the network level, I maintain my stance in the freedom of information and flow of traffic on the Internet.
Voltaire once wrote “I may not like what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. I fully agree but now that we’re in the information age, I think it may be more appropriate to say “I may not like what you have to share, but I will defend to the death your right to share it”. We cannot stop the flow of information - you can try, and I promise you that you will always fail. We must learn to embrace file sharing and peer-to-peer protocols. Specifically, corporations need to stop going against the grain and instead try a new approach. I applaud Netflix and Xbox 360 for their recent delivery of full content (eg: TV shows, movies, etc.) through the Internet, directly onto your computer or television. This is where the future of media content and delivery is going.