Yes, yes, I know, the Big Apple is New York but there’s something nice about calling Paris a Grande Pomme!

So, we’re back from our visit where we did everything we all hate about tourists: crowded around local beauty spots, took pictures of everything in sight, and spoke in a foreign language! No really, we had a lovely time and looked around all the usual suspects including the Tour Eiffel, the Arc de Triomphe, the Père Lachaise cemetery, and so on. Jess and I also went up to Montmartre in a futile effort to find the Café Les Deux Moulins from Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulin. Needless to say it took about 60 seconds to find a map to it once we got back home…

So…next time we go to Paris we’ll be much more organised, and visits will include (I hope!) Les Deux Moulins, the Buddha Bar (Warning: crappy French Flash web site), and Saint-Germain-des-Près for a knockout dose of modern French culture—the type you actually want to experience, not the dreadful pop-culture you experience by living there, which merits an entire, 100% ranting blog entry by itself.

BitTorrent has been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons. The name has been banded about as if it was a Technology of Evil™ and should be halted in its tracks. It is, in fact, a hugely useful technology that allows large files to be downloaded by people without placing an incredible burden on the content provider. I’ll lead you towards the official Introduction for more information.

What brings me to mention BitTorrent here is a rather well-known hosting company with several branches worldwide, 1&1 Internet Inc. (IWNL), who have recently told one of their customers they can’t distribute their own content through BitTorrent, presumably because of its use by pirating rings.

Although I currently don’t have any trouble with bandwidth, I’m now considering setting up a BitTorrent tracker and superseed to help with potential future bandwidth problems if people start to offer gigantic files for download. So, does anybody know of any good software to use as a tracker and seeder, a bit like Hurricane Electric?