BitTorrent race

I've been downloading a torrent for a while now where the behaviour is rather amusing.

When I started, there was no seed, only several peers, each just over 50% completed; they brought me up to 50% as well. Later, a seed showed up, but it sent data very, very slowly. Then as soon as one of us peers got a block of data from the seed, we'd share it out to the other peers, so pretty much everyone had the same completion level most of the time.

I could almost imagine the protocol traffic going on. "Hey, heard anything new?" "Nah." "Hey! Wait! The master told me a new secret!" "Oooh, gimme gimme!" "Here, catch!" followed by more waiting. The traffic graph was also interesting; occasional spikes in the "received data" window followed closely by corresponding spikes in the "sent data" window" as my client passed on the newly-acquired information to the others who hadn't had heard of it yet; then only low-level traffic on both sides for a while until someone had managed to acquire a full block from the seed again. So even with my asymmetric connection, I could help the others keep up their percentages because the lulls in traffic made up for the fact that my send rate was only about a third of the best receive rate I saw (and about a tenth of my maximum receive rate)—it just meant that I might spend 20 seconds receiving and a minute sending, but with, sometimes, three to five minutes between new packets, that difference was negligible.

Things are a bit different now; there's one peer which is a bit further ahead than most of us (about 1.2%), apparently because his upload rate is fairly slow as well, so he doesn't share out the new data he gets as fast as he receives new data.

"Let (someone) alone"

I was reading an article in the New York Times and came across the construction "[he] warned [someone] to let his sister alone".

That seemed odd; I can't recall having come across that construction before. I would have expected "to leave his sister alone", and thought at first that this was a mistake or something substandard. Yet according to the Columbia Guide to Standard American English,

leave me alone and let me alone are both Standard, and both mean either “Stop bothering me” or “Go away; I wish to be alone.”

Well. Learn something new every day!

Do you use "let me alone"? "leave me alone"? Both phrases equally? Do you make a difference between them (e.g. in meaning or register)?

Random Identity Generator

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More "do you say this?"

Again from Language Log, I came across an article comparing "let's not", "don't let's" and "let's don't", and quoting The Columbia Guide to Standard American English as saying that all three are standard.

I've only come across the first of those, and would have thought the second and third are substandard, though again, this may merely be an Americanism.

[Poll #753767]

Code generally uses only ASCII!

I always get a little bit sad when I see documentation that includes code snippets that have curly quotes, such as print “This is a test.\n”. I doubt that that code would even compile if you copy-pasted it into a file and compiled/ran it with the language in question. What's even worse is German documentation that takes "smart" quotes one step further and gives you print „This is a test.\n“—which not only has a really ugly closing quote in the Courier New so often used for code examples (the lines should point NE/SW rather than SW/SE for a German closing single quote IMO), but is even less similar to the correct print "This is a test.\n".

A related sadness comes when two consecutive hyphens turn into an en or em dash… reading about program invocations such as hello —foo=bar —baz=qux seems to me also a mark of bad typography (so as not to say "incompetence").

And finally, reading bits of code that use ligatures is something along those lines as well: my $file, for example. Eep.