Tanguy Ortolo

I have just bought a new motherboard, a ASRock E350M1/USB3 with and embedded AMD E350 processor. I was mostly interested in trying the embedded GPU and the UEFI firmware (UEFI is simply the name of EFI 2).

According to ASRock's marketing, the main benefit of that UEFI is its graphical interface that allows to use the mouse to configure the board. I cannot agree with that, because I think it is perfectly possible to implement that with a BIOS (and I think some BIOSes actually do it), and it is pointless anyway. For me, the main benefits are a faster and cleaner boot (no idea why it should be faster, but it is).

Read more Booting with UEFI

Using a very customizable email user agent (namely, Mutt), I am able to use several signatures depending on almost whatever criterion I want. So I spent some time drawing several thematic ones in ASCII Art, sometimes taking inspiration on existing models, sometimes entirely by myself (in bold). Hoping that it may be useful, here are some of them:

Read more ASCII Art signatures

rsync is often used to back up systems, with options such as:

-a --archive

recurse and preserve usual attributes: symlinks, devices and special files, user and groups ownership, permissions and times;

-H --hard-links

detect and preserve hard links;

-A --acls

preserve ACLs, if you use them;

-X --xattrs

preserve extended attributes, if you use them.

In addition to these common options, rsync has plenty others, so everyone has his own recipe, but I would like to share two useful options I discovered.

Read more Useful options of rsync

I have just bought a gamepad, the Saitek V.3 Cyborg Rumble Pad (also marketed as PS2700), mainly to play at SuperTuxKart under Debian GNU/Linux.

It works perfectly, except for one minor feature, and it can be used for playing and as an X11 input device.

Read more Using a gamepad under GNU/Linux

Trying the BitTorrent DHT

A month ago, noticing that there was a lack of a good BitTorrent tracker software (good meaning “complying with my random requirements”), I considered writing a new tracker. Then someone pointed out that I could try using the dynamic hash table or DHT, a BitTorrent extension that removes the need for a tracker, relying on the swarm or BitTorrent clients to do the tracking work.

Indeed, the DHT may be a nice solution to this problem because it has several advantages:

• it relies on the BitTorrent clients themselves, that are far more commonly used that BitTorrent trackers and thus more developed;
• this feature seems to be rather well adopted by the common BitTorrent client software;
• it already exist and seems to work rather well!

So, I went to try distributing trackerless torrents using the DHT. But with BitTorrent, file distribution is initiated using metainfo files, commonly called “torrent files” or simply “torrents”, so I needed a tool to generate trackerless metainfo files.

Writing a new metainfo generator

I did not find such a tool. The generators I found did not implement that extension and they were composed of many lines of C code, which I really did not want to dig into in order to extend them. So here it is, gentorrent, a BitTorrent metainfo generator written in Python 3 and distributed under the license AGPLv3, which proved rather easy.

I think it is fast enough, taking about ten seconds to calculate the metainfo for a file of one gibibyte. It implements all the BitTorrent extensions related to metainfo files, such as trackerless torrents, HTTP/FTP seeding or Merkle trees. Do not hesitate to test it and to send me comments, criticism or suggestions for a cooler name.

Now that I have a tool to generate trackerless torrents, I shall test the DHT more extensively and document this way of publishing files. If you are interested in this topic, e.g. you are maintaining a distribution system based on the antique BitTornado, stay tuned.