Technical Team
Here’s the technical team that has been helping, behind the scenes, to field listener reports, provide technical advice, and kept SlashdotReview on the air since October 12, 2004.
Peter Yorke
Peter Yorke is based in Seattle and provides the bittorrent feed and server facilities for SlashdotReview’s audio feed.
Peter is the founder of DownloadRadio.org and the designer of the enhanced Bittorrent System that creates multiple seeding servers at various geographic locations. Peter has many years of experience in hosting with major experience at Boeing Corporation and Exodus.
More about Peter and Downloadradio.org here.
Dwight Illk
Dwight Illk is based near Minneapolis, MN and has been a tremendous help in monitoring the health of various feedpoints and providing the helpful kick or ftp when scripts, servers or other boxes misbehave.
Dwight maintains the parallel suite of various podcatchers to monitor the feed each night.
HELP FOR SDR LISTENERS
If you are experiencing technical difficulties- with id3 tags, feed urls, partial downloads, missing programs, here’s your starting point:
SlashdotReviewHelp {at} gmail.com
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Frequently Asked Questions:
1. Where is SlashdotReview.com hosted ?
The web site and RSS-2 feed for the mp3 version of the program are hosted at GoDaddy.com on a dedicated Linux box. The mp3 files are hosted with Libsyn. The bittorrent feed is hosted at DownloadRadio.org.
2. Why do I see a re-direct on the RSS feed to Podtrac ?
Podtrac is our exclusive commercial representative outside of the TechPodcast Network, and the re-direct is used for traffic verification for the site.
3. Why has SDR maintained a bittorrent feed since October 2004 and continued to emphasize BT, even when many podcatchers do not support bittorrent? Two reasons. In the event of a failure on the primary server system, BT is extremely reliable, and able to scale by several orders of magnitude literally overnight, without attention. During our first year of growth we went through three hosting providers who were happy to provide ‘unlimited bandwidth’ until you started using bandwidth. The ability of DownloadRadio to robustly seed and maintain archival material for many months has enabled us to maintain at least some level of service regardless of the other challenges that arise.
The second reason is that SlashdotReview podcast is a daily demonstration of the ability of bittorrent – the technology – to provide substantial distribution of non-infringing content all over the world the the benefit of all. Not all bittorrent users are, by definition, pirates.
4. Why do I get two files? One with the extension of .mp3.torrent and the other with the extension of .mp3?
Slashdot Review can be downloaded the “normal” way, that is that the SDR*.mp3 file is downloaded directly from the Slashdot Review server. I have been calling this “normal RSS 2.0″.
SDR can also be downloaded using BitTorrent (BT) a peer to peer downloading protocol. This is a two step process, although using PodCatchers with integrated BitTorrent capability, the two steps may not be apparent to you, the end user.
Step 1: A very small torrent file (SDR*.mp3.torrent) is downloaded from DownloadRadio.org which contains some basic information about the .mp3 file and a pointer to the tracker. http://downloadradio.org/ provides download service for the torrent file, the tracker and a seed, or initial copy of the .mp3 file to get thing going. The tracker knows everyone that is trying to download the .mp3 file (peers.)
Step 2: You and other peers connected by the tracker download small parts of the file from other peers that have that part, and upload other small parts of the file to peers that don’t have that part yet. After a short time of such cooperation, you soon have the complete .mp3 file.
After completing the download of the .mp3 file, the .torrent.mp3 file no longer is of any value and can be deleted (unless your podcatcher automatically deletes it for you.)
For more information on BitTorrent see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent
5. Why do links in your show notes disappear after a few days ?
Each day I tag 10-15 stories (normally a few more than I use on air) in del.icio.us and then use the del.icio.us linkrolls script to generate the show notes for the listing.
That script displays the most recent 25 items. If you pull up an episode that is more than roughly three days old, a given story may fall off the bottom of the list.- and it will not appear in the show notes. If that happens, try the full list by clicking on the full list and you should find it there – just click on a likely keyword or use the search on del.icio.us .
6. Are some ISP’s causing Bittorrent Problems ?
I am glad you asked. AzureusWiki maintains a list of current reports on bandwidth throttling and other bad behaviors.
If you have a question you’d like answered, please send us an email and we will add it to the list.
Thanks
Andy McCaskey