Go Cornell!

I guess some kids (ok, PhD students and CS profs) in Upson Hall are working on this distributed system for searching .torrents.

Cubit creates alongside BitTorrent a lightweight peer-to-peer network designed from the ground up to enable rapid and accurate approximate searches. It performs the searches without relying on any centralized components, and therefore is immune to legal and technical attacks targeting torrent aggregators.

Of course, as several Slashdot commentators mentioned, this doesn’t solve the problem of file spam, things with misleading labels, etc. For that, you require some measure of trust in the file source. But that’s a different, and rather more difficult, problem.

1. This video is beautiful.

2. This woman is awesome. (And so is her company.)

3. This Flash tutorial was written by me.
(See how I snuck that in there? But seriously, I’m very excited about it.)

IE (6 at least, not sure about 7), has this behavior where it won’t register events on divs that it sees as “empty”. This came up in a project where I need to use invisible, positioned divs with event handlers on them.

But you can get around it, as long as the whole div can be invisible. The way I’m doing so is by using the star hack to add an IE-only style to the div. This style gives the div a background-color, and sets the opacity to zero. That way, the div is invisible to the user, but according to the browser there’s still something “there”, so it will properly register events.

The style would look something like this:

* html .activediv{ //star hack targets only IE
background-color:#FFFFFF; //background color makes the browser register events, like onclick
filter:alpha(opacity=0); //opacity filter hides it from the user
}

Again, I haven’t tested this in IE 7.