Well, sort of maybe. When I got back from Seattle I seemed to have no bandwidth, my net connection was slower than a modem. An hour or so of investigation led me to the web server’s access log, where I discovered everyone and his brother downloading music from my supposedly private collection of mp3’s. A little more digging and I discover a set of web pages with hundreds of links to free music downloads, including MANY to my server. I’m not sure how they got the links – I’ve been using Andromeda to stream the mp3 files to my work machine and to my living room media box. I’m not aware of any hacks to Andromeda, though it’s entirely possible they exist. It’s also possible it was simply an issue of the google spider indexing my music directories and someone having the patience to google my domain for mp3 files, off the cuff I’m not sure if andromeda protects about that, and I know for a fact that I stupidly did not create a robots.txt file to exclude the music directory from spiders. So…one way or another this was probably my fault, it still sucked though. The worst thing is the fear that the RIAA knows of this and a subpena is on its way even as I type. I don’t know for how long I was exposed in this way; I do know I had been having intermittent bandwidth and particularly latency problems prior to christmas, so its possible and even likely that this has been going on for months. ugh. Anyway a quick change on the permissions of the music directory and the would be pirates are now getting 404 errors (you should see my logs). If you’re from the RIAA and you’re investigating, trust me, I didn’t do this on purpose, and I own legitimate copies of the music I’ve transcoded and stored on my server. Please go away and pick on someone else 😉

An interesting aside – Pink Floyd was the overwhelming choice of the pirates, like 80% of them were grabbing Pink Floyd, particularly older stuff like Umma Gumma and A Momentary Lapse of Reason. At least they have interesting and refined taste.

I’ve been a fan of outliners ever since I stumbled across More while I was in college. Many a paper was written with More and later the MS Word outliner. I’ve had a fetish for them ever since. Today I got caught on an outliner meme and turned up some pretty cool stuff which I’ve collected as links. For anyone who needs a little free-form data storage tool that has a small memory footprint , take s moment to check outsome outliners. Links:

• Nice overview of available windows outliners
• atpm.com is running a great series of articles on outliners, including their history, some great information on how people use them and an explanation of the features available in the various outlining packages. The atpm articles get into exhaustive details on the available outliners for all OS’s too, despite their mac focus. (and the former mac junkie in me will point out how the innovation in this software comes mostly from the mac clients over the years).
• My current favorite (Leo) outliner, and another good one (Joe, the Java outliner), both cross platform (one Java, one tcl/tk).

The other interesting area of development is tying outline editors to wikis: I have great hopes for this class of software though so far nothing is to the point where I can really use it. I might manage to get a set of Leo templates going to manage this for me but I would prefer a turnkey solution. If you’re on a mac, you can check out the first halting steps towards this kind of system.

The Independent Games Festival has announced this year’s contest finalists. There are several games worth checking out, but Bontago takes the prize as far as I’m concerned. Realistic physics, very clever design, excellent graphics, and multiplayer, all for the low low price of $0. I would have paid $15-20 for this game, and still will if the developer releases it commercially. Who’s up for a game?

(don’t skip checking out Starshatter though, I have high hopes for this one too).