Surounding myself in heaps of tutorials

Currently, I am printing off heaps of different tutorials, Firefox tutorials, XPCOM tutorials, information on the torrent protocol.

In the next week, I will be living off coffee and coke, jugging school work with development of a prototype of BitFox for the end of April.

You may not be able to download torrents, but hopefully you will be able to connect to a torrent and get information about it. Once that is done, it should be all good.

Alpha 002 due end of April

I have set a goal to have Alpha 002 released by the end of April.

The main difference from Alpha 001 will be that Alpha 002 will be able to download torrents. That is the only feature I am working on at the moment.

Yes, I will slowly add more features over time, but I don't really want to overload it, so I will have to draw a line at what is possible with the limitations I have, not overloading it, and what is needed.

I am naming them by 00's, because I want the last Alpha to be 007 ;)

[While I hope to have it out at the end of April, whether it will happen or not is a different matter, but I am working hard to make it happen]

Alpha 001 and XPCOM components

I have released Alpha 001, but it isn't really useable. If you look in our release pages, you will see that all Alpha 001 is, is a skeleton for the extension.

Also, as I posted last post, I made a XPCOM component in JavaScript, and managed to compile one in C++ (but I haven't managed to get it to register yet, but I haven't tried that much), so I will be able to work on BitTorrent code VERY soon!

- Josh

Getting somewhere with XPCOM

I was just looking at a simple JavaScript XPCOM tutorial, and suddenly, it just all made sense!

I will attempt to add a JavaScript XPCOM component to the source code soon, and if that all works, hopefully it will not be much harder to add a C++ one, and then the extension will start to look like... it!

- Josh

Edit: For those geeks out there... I am having some problems with SVN, but I managed to compile something.

I just copied and pasted all the code from this page. It may only be a hello world, but that hello world will be from a xpcom component. I am currently testing it to see if it works.

I managed to compile everything fine, as I said, I haven't tested it yet, but will. When I get SVN fixed and a working copy, I will upload it to SVN, and then start working on a C++ version of the same component. Once that is done, BitFox will be on its way.

If anyone is able to help with XPCOM

XPCOM makes my head hurt. It is the only language/system/etc that I haven't been able to understand. It shouldn't be that hard to compile a simple C++ file into a component, and then have that component accessable by the FF extension (I know how to do the latter, it is just compiling it I am having problems with).

I am able to work on other parts of the extension for now, but I put out this plea for anyone experienced with XPCOM and C++ (I am all good with C++, but XPCOM and C++, ouch). If you are experienced with XPCOM and C++, please email me, josh@joshhendo.com. It would be great if you could join the project (see the main page), but just been able to help me compile some simple C++ code into a component would be great.

BitFox won't get anywhere without any help. Hopefully Ben from FireStorm will get back to me soon and put me in the right direction!

SVN isn't my favourite tool to work with

I have to admit, I have never really worked with SVN before (I have got stuff from it, but never added stuff), and I have to say it is very confusing.

I have had this problem before, but I can't be bothered to fix it tonight. So if no one can find anything in SVN, or very little... sorry! It will be up sometime tomorrow.

For those interested, the code I was going to upload was just code that added a BitFox tab to the preferences (unix) / options (windows) dialog, and a uncompiled sample C++ component (the only problem I have now is turning it into a XPCOM component, once I get that and am able to access the code (as I said, very simple code, just to test if I can access it from the extension), then I will be able to include some BitTorrent code).

Clear up a few of the comments on Digg

I just want to clear up some of the comments posted on the recent Digg article about BitFox.

i may potentially use this only for smaller torrents, i'll still leave the larger torrents to utorrent

Yep, that is exactly what I was thinking when I decided to make it. There was one torrent that I got, that wasn't that big (50meg), and it downloaded at about full speed, and I thought that it would be cool if it was treated just like a normal download.

Yes. That's generally the way it works anyway. Most users stop seeding after they've completed a torrent. Some of us won't. It's only a tool. A good one potentially.

The idea is that users will continue to seed after the torrent has finished downloading while FF is still running, but like any good program/extension, they will be notified and have the option to turn it off (I don't like to hard code options in).

Am I the only one who thinks this is a bad idea? I know that I don't _always_ have firefox running. I restart it from time to time, or simple close it if I'm not using it.

What we need is a bittorrent client that runs as a service, and communicates with a seperate frontend or web UI...Maybe I should start coding one....

For large, slow torrents, I agree with you. As I mentioned above, I made it for small torrents that are similar sizes to things you would generally download in FF (I would never download a large file in FF). I will continue to use another BitTorrent client even after BitFox has a working copy.

I don't get it why would anyone want to try and do this? uTorrent is 170KB does every single feature a torrent should do and doesn't require installation! Long Live uTorrent!

A challenge. I really don't care if no one uses it actually (I don't know how many people actually would), I just want to try and do this.