Today’s National Post has an insert called “marketnews Here’s How” with all kinds of HDTV news including the ExpressVu HDTV PVR announcement. In addition ExpressVu added several HDTV stations yesterday. I recommend a close look at a Yamaha Amp (with component video switching and S-video up-conversion) when getting in the home theatre system.
Day: October 1, 2004
Azureus – way cool BitTorrent client
I kept hearing about
Azureus
in various places,
but I dismissed it because I thought it was a Windows client for BitTorrent,
and I use my Mac to do BitTorrent downloads.
It turns out that Azureus is written in Java.
Normally, this is not enough to ensure that it will run smoothly on a Mac,
however, there is a Mac-specific download which has been tweaked to run well.
So I tried it, and everything was most excellent.
There were options I have been pining for like:
- max global upload speed
- max global download speed
- prioritization of downloads with a small number of peers
I got it running and everything was going swell.
Then suddenly I got the dreaded Translucent Message of Death,
or to be more precise, a kernel panic.
this bug
is
well known,
and has been tracked down to Apple’s
“
lookupd
” daemon.It only affects dual-CPU systems, which is me, alas.
The workaround is to set up your Mac as a caching name server, so that
named
is used instead of lookupd
.
There is along and laborious description
aimed at People Who Never Use the Command Line, but I can sum it up in just a few steps for you here.
Remember, this only applies if you have a dual-CPU Mac.
-
Edit
/etc/hostconfig
, and change “DNSSERVER=-NO-
” to “DNSSERVER=-YES-
“. This will cause the name server daemon (/usr/sbin/named
) to be started automatically the next time you reboot. -
Edit
/etc/named.conf
, and un-comment the line “// query-source address * port 53;
” by removing the two slashed from the front. -
Start named by typing
/usr/sbin/named
in a Terminal window as root - Change your primary DNS server under Network Preferences to be 127.0.0.1 (i.e. your own machine) and click “Apply Now”.
- In Azureus, in Preferences->Transfer, make sure that “[x] Slowly connect new peer connections” is enabled. This may be optional, I’m not sure.