Intro Interactive – ICM501a

Just so that it’s abundantly clear: we have no class meeting this week. The university is officially on recess.

Gobble, gobble.

One of the assignments this week is to watch the film Steal This Film 2. Actually, as you may have guessed, it’s not necessary to steal it, as it is licensed for free download. Now the question is how to get it. There is the easy way and the hard way.

The easy way is to google the title. You’ll find copies of the film on Google Video and elsewhere. That’s fine–the important thing is that you see the film.

If you go to the official site for the film, you will see links to downloads in much higher resolution: that is, non-postage-stamp sizes. Now, the problem with these larger files is that they are too big to be effectively hosted and downloaded. The XVID, for example, is over 600 mb. So, the links they have on the site are used to locate the torrents for those files.

It’s useful to know how to use bittorrent. It’s an important way of distributing large files like this one on the internet. Bittorrent disrupts the client-server model a bit. When you start downloading a file, you also serve chunks of that file to other people who are trying to download it. By distributing that process in a peer-to-peer way, you don’t need to have huge servers to host huge files.

The trick is, you still need to have some way of getting a handle on those files. Even if you don’t need a central server, you do need a tracker that tells you who is providing the file at any given time. The most notorious of these trackers is probably The Pirate Bay. (It should be obvious, I suppose, that bittorrent–like other peer-to-peer systems–tends to host a lot of “pirated” materials.)

To download a bittorrent file, you need a bittorrent client. My favorite is µTorrent. Once this is installed, when you click on a link to a bittorrent file, it will load into your client. Then just let it run. It will likely take at least overnight to download a large file like one of these–so just give it time.

Episode 171: BitTorrent Unscrambled – These bloopers are hilarious

Just a quick note on your self-evaluations. I got hit with triple deadlines with my three classes. Hope to be back to you all by Friday. Sorry for the slow return of the grades.

Sorry for the delay. Had some unexpected speedbumps.

As I mentioned, I liked the Emmy-winning design of the L-Word’s orientation island for Second Life. As noted here, it’s the way an SL orientation was meant to be. Unfortunately, it appears that it is now dead. So instead, if you are not already in Second Life, you can join up via the NMC’s orientation. I haven’t tried it yet, but have heard it’s good. Let me know how it goes. (If you’ve already been in-world, you still can go to the NMC orientation by following this link.)

On Wednesday at 6:30 EST we will be meeting in a space that is owned by a graduate of the ICM program, and he will meet us in world if he has the chance. Some of you have asked if we will be in the classroom. While you can try to get on from the classroom, it’s best to use a very quick connection, if possible; ideally a direct wired connection for most of you. I’ll be accessing from a hotel in Milwaukee.

There are two ways to get to our meeting spot. The easy way is to follow this link, and that should bring you to the spot in-world. Unfortunately, I’ve found that some people have trouble with this method (SLURLs) and so you’ll have to find it the “hard way.”

Once you are in world:

1. Open up your map
2. Type in Quietly Tuesday as the land
3. Hit “Search”
4. In location, enter 208, 100, 22
5. Hit “Teleport”
6. And then get out of the way to avoid incoming avatars rezzing on top of you .

I’ll try to be in-world a little bit early, though I’m coming from a meeting, so probably not too early.

I should have clarified this in class–and I’ll make sure to schedule time to talk about the assignments in our meetings. Was hoping folks would post about other bloggers on their own blogs. I see a couple of you are worried about how to mark your comments, or have had comments held up in moderation.

But you are the king/queen of your own blog, and the blogosphere is nothing if not networked. If you’ve already done the commenting–no worries, my bad. But you may want to do a quick entry on your own blog linking to it (or via Twitter) so I know where you made your commentary!

Rather than try to keep the blogroll up to date, I’m just using a copy of the widget that Google Reader produces. So, the list of blogs on the right is complete, and if you click on “View All” you can read them in a single feed (the so-called “river of news” format).

Just a quick post to make you aware of your classmates in the blogroll on the right side. I’ve only linked those I’ve seen some sort of activity on. Hopefully, by Sunday night, I’ll have all of your blogs listed.

Stop by and say “hi” to your classmates!

Welcome to ICM501a for the fall of 2009. I’m very excited to get started, and I hope you are too. Please note that the tabs up top give you access to the syllabus and the modules for the course.

As you get your first posts up, I will link to them from the blogroll on the right.

On to module 1!