Metalink

I found (or more accurately was pointed to) another cool possible basis for Kamaelia component - metalink. It's a download metadata format/system for grabbing parts of a download from multiple sources. For example, if your BitTorrent download is stuck at 99.2% then there's FTP mirrors you could try, or if the primary HTTP server for a file is slow you could grab bits from several mirrors. It's a good idea but I had some reservations - namely that you really should store hashes for parts of the file as well as the whole so that the correctness of each section can be confirmed, rather than having to start again if one byte was wrong. This is how BitTorrent checks the integrity of files. The author kindly sent me the Metalink 3.0 Draft Specification which I'm perusing right now. It's XML based and so easily extensible which is nice.

In other news, I've added a non-witty mode to Kambot (say "stfu kambot" to toggle it) to stop it from saying stuff during meetings etc. on #kamaelia.