BitTorrent

I usually read fortune.com, the world of high finance is intriguing. This week's feature was BitTorrent's inventor Bram Cohen. Not that Cohen is into high finance or anything, quite the contrary. His application, they say, constitutes a third of all internet traffic. The program is, yes, open source. Only the name BitTorrent is a trademark.

Keben uses it to download whole movies (I have in my possession Carlito's Way, a mafia flick by Al Pacino, in VCD format, available if anyone is interested). Using our very own nearly non-existent Kenyan bandwidth. Takes about 4 hrs a movie. The Hollywood guys are hollering madly.

My next step, was to want to look at the innards of such a brilliant product. So I download the source code, a nifty 490 KB. The executable is approximately the same size. No monstrous libraries and dlls. And yes, like all brilliant things, this one is complex. I cannot decipher a single line of code, especially because I have become a language specific freak. Its written in Python (what is it with this language?), and seems to have some traces of AI and serious maths in the algorithms (from the readme files and other un-related information).

Jolly Good.