UUIDs make me cry a little

So, I feel a little bad every time I create a UUID. Some part of me wants to conserve them. I mean, shit, their supposed to be universally unique, so if I create one for some nonsense trivial reason, I've used up one that could have been used for something important, like labeling a gene related to cancer, or tracking an incoming nuke. Sure, I know there are enough possible combinations that one can be created ever nanoseconds for billions of years before their all used up, but that's still a scarce resource. I bet someone came up with the same calculation for oil at one point. See where we are now?

So, I've decided to limit my use of UUIDs. I'm only going to create them when I absolutely need them. Only when a UUID is required and there is no other way of identifying something without it. It's my way of bringing a little balance to the universe. I'm doing the right thing. Good karma.

If you want to be jerk and use up UUIDs like there's no tomorrow, I guess you can go here and generate a bunch. In fact, they make it easy for you to do it in bulk (500 at a time). Go ahead. Jerk.

BitTorrent Google Maps Mashup

I had a thought this evening as I was checking the current peer list in my bit torrent client. I should point out that I don't really torrent much (if that's the verb), so the whole deal is pretty foreign to me. Although I understand it technically, I don't have much use for most of the torrentable content out there. I buy most of my music and video, so my use of bit torrent is limited to the odd seed I run into.

In any case, the idea... I thought it might be pretty cool to be able to look at the peer list (the list of torrent clients out there that are feeding and feeding off of you) in a geographical representation. The IP address would be used to locate the ISP (if not the client itself), and the current speed of download/upload could be represented with the size or color of the map maker. That would be pretty sweet (but not useful).

I figure someone out there is doing something like this already so I asked the Google. After sorting through a list of stuff that I wasn't looking for, I found this blog entry. I'm not sure if the guy made the Google Maps mashup or just found it. I didn't read the blog long enough to figure it out. After I found that the link to whatever he was linking to was broken I pretty much lost interest.

Maybe I'll find the time to create it myself. Probably not. But, that would be sweet (but not useful).

First post.

Google made it pretty easy to click a few buttons from iGoogle and create a blog. So, here it is. Maybe I'll post, maybe not. Whatever.