Day: September 30, 2005

Too LOW on Cholesterol?

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The cool thing about being a curmudgeon is speaking your mind even when it contradicts “common wisdom.” Doctors today (who are mainly working for the drug companies trying to sell tons of drugs) are constantly harping on “lower your cholesterol, lower your cholesterol!” However, cholesterol is a naturally secreted substance in the body. God designed it to “plug” cracks in the walls of veins and arteries, for instance. If you drop it too low, you can have issues. For instance, check out this article:

Low Cholesterol A Problem?

Have you noticed that at one time 200 was considered a “good to excellent” level… now, it is 170! And, most people can’t get down to 170 without… guess what? Drugs! I wonder why the “good” level was lowered? Hummmmm… yeah. Drug company sales. So what is the “right” level? I would say whatever the level would be if you ate right, got the right amount of exercise, and got plenty of water. Whatever is right for YOUR body!

Geek Software of the Week: Azureus – Java BitTorrent Client

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Wikipedia says of BitTorrent: “BitTorrent is the protocol and the name of the peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution tool written by programmer Bram Cohen and debuted at CodeCon 2002. The reference implementation is written in Python and is released under the BitTorrent Open Source License (a modified version of the Jabber Open Source License), as of version 4.0. The name ‘BitTorrent’ refers to the distribution protocol, the original client application, and the .torrent file type.

With BitTorrent, files are broken into smaller fragments, typically a quarter of a megabyte each. As the fragments are distributed to the peers in a random order, they can be reassembled on a requesting machine. Each peer takes advantage of the best connections to the missing pieces while providing an upload connection to the pieces it already has. This scheme has proven particularly adept in trading large files such as videos and software source code. In conventional downloading, high demand leads to bottlenecks as demand surges for bandwidth from the host server. With BitTorrent, high demand can actually increase throughput as more bandwidth and additional ‘seeds’ of the completed file become available to the group. Cohen claims that for very popular files, BitTorrent can support about a thousand times as many downloads as HTTP.”

Azureus – Java BitTorrent Client

This is an excellent Java client for BitTorrent with lot’s of great features. Try it! You’ll like it!