Entries from June 2006 ↓
June 28th, 2006 — Potpourri
Ok, this is a repeat article for all who might have read this in my WP.com blog.. but still with Superman Returning to the silver screen, I thought it might be appropriate posting it again now.
I heard this in a AIR FM radio show and it was good (or that’s what I felt) and thought of sharing here..
Two friends were meeting after a long time. The first friend was so surprised to see his friend in such a bad state as he used to look good and well built.
He asked him:” Boy! You were a superman”. “What the fuck happened to you, after your marriage?”
“I am a Doberman now!!”
My Favorite Super Hero returns
Super Man - The man of Steel is returning to the silver screen after a hiatus of 2 decades. I’m pretty excited and wait for the movie to hit the cinemas.
The initial reviews at IMDb has been good even though I’m not happy with the trailers and promos. Kevin Spacey is one of my favourite actor and I got to see his movie after a long time.
I think I’ll Check out the movie in the cinemas this weekend and tell you guys how good the movie was in my opinion.
June 26th, 2006 — Potpourri, Sports
The coolest thing ever to happen for all you Firefox users. If you a soccer mad user, then it’s even more cool.
Check my current theme: (Another snapshot taken from the site)
The Brazilian one is the coolest and I have that as my current theme, even though I support England.
Park your Firefox here for more : Joga.com Companion For Firefox
June 22nd, 2006 — Sports
Ever wondered why Cricket rules the roost in India?
Here is a fact file on various sports in India and how it fares….
Hockey
Meet a team which can’t even pass properly. Coaches come and go even more than the players. (That is : We see more Coaches than players). You can’t imagine the blame game that’ll go here. The players blame the coach, coaches blame players for not cooperating, the Indian hockey board adds to the confusion…even the referees are not spared.
Indian Hockey + Doordarshan’s Coverage + Hindi commentary = Undisputed show of lousiness on earth.
The tragic comedy here is that this is India’s National Game.
Tennis
We have a teenage sensation called Sania Mirza. She (according to me) has a serious attitude problem. She won’t even move to second round of any major tournament. More on her problems here: Give Sania Mirza a break.
We have two good players (only in doubles) Leander and Mahesh. But they won’t play with each other. And I must admit that it’s singles that’ll interest viewers not doubles. Other players like Harsh Mankad, Rohan Bopanna, Prakash Amritraj are young. But by the time they play well, they’ll become too old.
Formula One
Narain Karthikeyan is India’s sole face in Formula one. I have not seen him drive much. He’s now with Williams second test driver. Yeah he lacks sponsorship and big money but still the bottom line is he is not racing and his future in formula one as a race driver is uncertain. He’s quite old as well.
What about others? We have Karun Chandok and Armaan Ibrahim are promising but I can’t imagine how’ll they get in the money that’s required?
Soccer
I know only two players in the Indian Team. One is Baichung Butia and the other is V T I M Vijayan. Vijayan is retired now. But I know all the players in the England or Brazil squad. That sums up the popularity of soccer in India. I think Soccer is the only game in India where the federation cup or any inter club tournaments are popular and more viewed than the National squad playing elsewhere.
Chess
This is the only sport that India truly shines. Vishy is World’s number 2. He’s not playing not that well in the recent tournaments but still he has a good reputation. There are so many players who are good. I need not list them now. We have the youngest GMs in the world. Chess in India never so good.
But unfortunately Chess can’t have viewers. I have not seen a single tournament shown in the TV (forget live coverage) except in Doordarshan. The players play for a long period of time and you’ll be bored to death if you watch it.
Shooting
Shooting in India was never better. We have a fine bunch of young talented shooting stars. We are starting to perform well in overseas competition. I guess we might win some medals in Olympics as well. But the story ends there. Can you actually watch shooting?
Gymnastics
People in India think Gymnastics is some circus show. (I’m serious and not kidding).
Cricket
We Indians love long sagas, don’t we? Right from the two Epics, Mahabharatha and Ramayan to Bollywood’s 3.5 hours movies to Ekta Kapoor’s “K” TV Shows and serials… the rage continues.
We also love 5 day drama on the field called the “Test” matches.So you can imagine why even this Twenty20 format is also not popular.
We play Cricket better than we play other sports. I don’t want to prove that by quoting some freak ICC rankings.
Now you know why India is Cricket crazy.
June 18th, 2006 — P2P, Technology,Softwares & Computers
Almost got a heart attack after seeing this:
It’s nothing new
BSNL Dataone is know for it’s crap IPs. Dataone forces usage of proxy and allows spywares in their network. Here is the proof for the same: (Thanks Riyaz)
And going down the memory lane, Bitme.org has already banned Chennai Dataone IPs (or atleast most of them can’t open) long time back:
Now it’s a bad-sad news for me. I used to leech a lot of movie from there. Just want to know as to how many Chennai BSNL Dataone user can open Bitme or Bitsoup. Anyone?
June 8th, 2006 — P2P, Technology,Softwares & Computers
I have seen many people asking this question. Downloading large files via torrents will take time to complete. But we do need to browse occasionally as well, don’t we? I get irritated when the speeds gets too low now that I am used to my 256k line.
Here are some tips which might help you browse effectively while your torrents runs. Not that you’ll get very good speeds, but you’ll notice the difference.
1. Limit Maximum Peers connections per torrent
Your torrent client will try to establish many contacts with other peers connected to the tracker within a very short period of time. When the half-open connection limit is reached, new connections will be queued until some of the current connections are established. So we have to limit the number of peers that we are connecting irrespective of the number of peers that the torrent file may connect to.
I use BitTornado and here’s how to do the same in it:
In the case of Azureus : Tools -> Configuration -> Connection -> set the “Maximum number of connections per torrent” to 60.
At the moment, I have this limited to 40 only. This works like a charm for my 256k connection. In case you have a high speed connection experiment with this value till you get an optimum performance.
2. Limit maximum connections per torrent
Your client tries to establish a whole lot of connections at once then they just get queued up one at a time until they are fully established. Only 10 get serviced at any one time. This is the same with any requests you make with a web browser - they just get queued. This results in lesser speeds for browsing.
Let the maximum connections be twice the number of peer connected but you should experiment with this and find what works best for you.
Check the “Maximum simultaneous outbound connection attempts” in your client and make sure the number is not 10 or higher. I think the default is 8. If you have a slow connection, then let this value be low else vice versa.
3. Limit maximum upload slots
This is value that describes the amount of uploading you want to do. Limit this value according to your line specifications. Incase you have a high speed connection set this to a higher value as it might effect your download speeds. I have set it to 3.
4. Maximum numbers of active torrents
Maximum numbers of active torrents is the number of torrents that run at a time. In case you get full possible BW with a single torrent, then avoid running more than one torrent at a time. 2 torrents running at the same speed , say 30KBps each and a single torrent running at 60KBps might result in same amount of data being downloaded in a particular time, but as your client need to connect to peers and more connections used up (eventually queuing later on) your browsing speed get affected. So run as less amount of torrent at a time.
So for my BitTornado with a 256k/64k line, I use the following settings:
Max connections - 80
Peers per torrent - 40
upload slots - 3
Maximum numbers of active torrents - one only (but incase it’s an “unlucky torrent” then 2 torrents will run at a time)
Read more abt the first 4 points here : Of TCP connections, SP2 and Faster Torrents Download Speeds
5. Check your Router
Too many concurrent connections for the nat table to handle also make sure router logs are turned off as these can cause trouble.
If you think the router is the cause for the problem, then do a soft/hard reboot of the modem.
6. Limit the maximum download rate
Instead of pausing the torrent, you can limit the max download rate. I guess 10KBps would be sufficient for a decent browsing speed for casual browsing or checking mails and also your torrent runs fine. After browsing change the max download rate to zero (or your previous value).
7. Aviod using BitComet torrent client
BitComet client usage is not recommended. It’s bad for both the peers and the trackers. You might get the maximum possible speed with BitComet, but to judge a client’s performance you need to check the time taken to complete a file. In other words, you need to see how data was downloaded in a particular time. BitComet is know to download more retundant data (crap data). Although BitComet’s latest version does not has this problem , it got a bad reputation and you’ll never know. Moreover all the Private Torrent Tracker site recoomend either Azureus or BitTornado or torrent.
8. Download from public trackers
If you have a low speed connection (say less than 512kbps), then you won’t need a private tracker as others do as your download rate is bound to be low. In the public trackers, the peers are not in a pressure to seed (or upload more) or forced to do the same. So your connection won’t be hit with packets from the other peers. Moreover if you have a low speed connection, then if the peers send you more and more data than your connection can handle, it’ll just queue it exhausting all our outbound connections including your browser’s thus resulting in slow browsing speeds. So if speed is not a issue and you get good BW with public trackers, go for it, you’ll experience better browsing speeds.
9. Disable Firewall
It’s the same story here again. The Firewall you have installed checks the data that is being transferred and if you have a low speed connection, the packets (of both Firewall and the file you download) gets queued results in lesser/queued connection for your browser to get BW. So uninstall the firewall or allow the firewall to give your client’s full access.
10. Use a non-IE browser
Try to avoid using Internet Explorer (IE). I don’t want to “support” any particular browser, but using a non-IE browser like Firefox, Opera or Maxthon (an IE based browser) helps a lot. Not only do you get better speeds but features that aren’t available with IE. You are secure and safe from threats and you browse faster as well.
No one can give you the best settings. It’s up to you to experiment with the value and see which one give you the optimum performance. Point out ant mistakes (if any) in this article or any other tips you follow, I’ll be glad to update this article.
Be advised that whatever do you do, you won’t get more BW than what is alloted for you by your ISP. All these instructions only enhance your browsing experience while the torrents run in the background. Follow these 10 basic and simple guidelines and you’ll experience better browsing (with your torrents running in the background) for sure.
Happy Leeching and Browsing!
June 3rd, 2006 — P2P
I had this kind of posts in my mind for a very long time. I have using the P2P and torrents for over 2 years right from my good old dial-up days.
Here is a hell lot of trackers from where you can leech stuffs that you might require. Though I don’t visit also of these sites, you might take a look and see site is good for you. I always use Private torrent trackers. You can read more about Private torrent trackers and check out the lists of some of them here: Private Torrent Trackers
I have some Supertorrents , Demonoid, X264 invites. So in case you are interested, you can request it here. I’ll send you the invites.
In case you are new to the torrent world, then no worries! Check this guide here: How to download stuffs using torrents.
List of the Best Torrent Tracker sites
As we all know there are many torrent sites. What which are the best ones? Which stand out among the rubble? There is a list of the best torrent trackers ranging from music sites to X264 to HD torrents to private torrent trackers to desi torrents to even football torrents!
*All the torrent tracker sites listed are public trackers unless stated otherwise. Private Trackers are marked here as a “#”*
List of the best Subtitles Sites
Now that you have downloaded successfully, you might need a subtitle file to your movie file. In case you don’t know how to add a subtitles to a movie or even don’t know what subtitles, then check this guide Adding Subtitles to Movies.
Here is the list of the sites from where we can download subtitles in various languages:-
Hope you liked this post. Please point out any errors, I’ll fix it out.
Enjoy and Happy leeching!
June 2nd, 2006 — Live Streaming
I know that there will be a lot of Football viewership (as if you don’t know) and some might not have the opportunity to catch it live on your Television sets. Well.. you can get updated over the latest via online viewing live streaming.
Even BBC is gonna do the same for free and show short highlights from every match of the World Cup on the Internet and also will have exclusive rights to England’s second-round and quarter-final games if the team advances.
I just got to see this Streaming Stats World Cup Edition 1.0 which is a Freeware application for getting the latest news, sport and Live World Cup 2006 and it includes RSS as well. Check it out here.
Some Programs with which you can watch:
1. CCTV 5 (for both football and NBA)
2.PPStream (P2P Streaming)
If you don’t want the hassle of having to download any software..there are sites where we just click the channel name & it plays the stream.
1. Free Football TV
2. Medinalia (http://www.medinalia.com/tv.php)
3. FOOTBALL NEWS / LIVE SCORES / LIVE STREAMING (Many channels to choose from)
I guess these are sufficient for now..
I will add more links as and when the World cup gets underway and update links in here.
[Update]
1. BBC Streaming Service of the World Cup matches live.
In case you live outside the UK, then check this guide to bypass the restriction.
2. Football Streaming (the catch is that you need to be registered in their site)
[Update] (1st July,2006)
Check another article on the same topic:
Live FIFA World Cup Streaming Telecast
If anyone knows more site, let me know. I’ll update this list in here.
Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any services that the above sites might offer.
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