I use Azureus as my bittorrent client. It has this nifty feature that is similar to the Updater Application Block that will automatically check for and download updates on startup of the application. The only downside for me is that since I was running JRE 1.4, and after a little battle with my wireless router, I could contact trackers okay, but not peers.

Balls.

So I look around the program to see what I can see. Oh look! There's an irc client that is loaded as a plugin! I haven't been on an irc channel since like '98 or '99, but it can't have changed that much, right? /join, /msg, yeah, I think I'm good to go.

So I hop on the channel, fully expecting some random bs to be flying around like it used to be. How wrong I was. Myself along with about 4 or 5 others having issues with azureus got coached thru getting azureus running like a champ. In particular, two people helped me not only get az up and running correctly again, but also coached me on getting it set to its optimal settings for my cable internet link at home.

I'd like to thank martouf5 (no link given) and PhilKC for being such a big help with my n00b azureus hurdles. A couple of things that I learned thru this:

• The channel has a very helpful, friendly tone - this was even true when I returned later to ask permission to use these guys' nicks on my blog, so it wasn't a fluke afaict.
• You can test your connection speed on www.dslreports.com or www.testmy.net You gotta dig a little bit for the one on dslreports, but they both give you pretty much the same information.
• Installing the JRE v1.5 does not uninstall previous versions. It's been a while since I've done any kind of Java development, but I wonder if this is because they have a SxS story like there is with the .NETfx? If so, there must be a way to tell a program which runtime to use...
• There is a bot (AzBot) on the channel (irc.freenode.net, #azureus-users) that will tell you the optimal settings to use with azureus by typing a command like /msg AzBot upspeed 5008. I find that simply incredible. And incredibly useful.

I was told by martouf5 that the motto of bittorrent is "give and you shall receive" - he said that was pretty much the attitude of this particular channel, and they all volunteer and help out people as they can. Judging from the conversations that I saw briefly, they get pretty much the same questions over and over, so I guess that helps in its way. He also humbly claimed that he was not one of the channel's "heavyweights" - that there were others there that helped a lot more than he does - but he helped me darnit, so he gets the credit he deserves here. PhilKC is actually what martouf5 would call a "heavyweight" and they both helped me when I needed it...so thanks, y'all.

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