Daily Archive for August 25th, 2007

Sidewalk dining…

Published on August 25, 2007 in Food, Providence, Urban Issues and Walkability. Closed

This has been a pet peeve of mine for a while. I enjoy going out to eat, and on a nice summer night, there’s nothing like sitting outside while eating. That pleasure vanishes when your dining “room” has suddenly become someone else’s walkway. I live in Federal Hill about a block from Atwells Ave, the dining Mecca of Providence. The street is lined with restaurant after restaurant. The sidewalks on Atwells Ave are not the extra wide sidewalks found in super pedestrian cities like New York or Boston. They’re regular old Providence city sidewalks. If I had to guess at the width of them, I’d say about 6 feet or so from the building to the curb. The restaurants have decided that they need to attract tourists with their “outdoor dining”. That means that tables have been setup on these already somewhat narrow sidewalks to accommodate the diners. Some tables are round, some are square, some are two-tops some are 4 tops, some are setup square to the building, others are setup more diamond shape. These tables end up taking up about 4 feet of the space on the sidewalk, that’s two-thirds of the room, 66% of the space to walk. Now, on a night like tonight, with humidity near 90% and temps in the 80′s, you’d think that people wouldn’t want to eat outside. That is except for the fact that it’s “quaint” to eat out side. You get the lovely ambiance of the cars driving by, the guys giving cat calls to the girls crossing the street, the cars parked on the sidewalk, and the pedestrians, remember the pedestrians, this is a city after all, bumping into you because they have to dodge the valets flying in and out in front of the restaurants and the sandwich board signs in front of every restaurant advertising that they have valet. That brings me to another point… are these signs even permitted to be there and do all the restaurants really need valet? There’s a strip with 3 restaurants – Siena, 242, and Opa – each of which with their own valet and sidewalk dining (and these are the worst offenders with taking up too much of the sidewalk).

In an urban environment on a street that attracts so many pedestrians at all times of the year, especially the summer, the tables and the sandwich boards should not be allowed. The restaurants on Atwells Ave do not need the outdoor dining to attract customers. They simply need to be open, especially in the summer. There is no shortage of people who want to eat and on a night like tonight, every restaurant on Atwells was packed to the brim.

Note to anyone who has an interest, outdoor seating, while important to the tourists, does not belong on narrow sidewalks. Take a lesson from Trinity Brewhouse. They have a “deck” attached to the building with outdoor seating. The building is set back a bit more from the street than anywhere on Atwells. If Atwells were bigger, it’d work, but it’s not. The outdoor seating is not attracting anyone, and the only people eating out there are doing so because it’s the only option. It might give you a few more tables and a few more customers, but it kills the flow of pedestrian traffic and I’m sure the customers aren’t overly happy with pedestrians bumping into them while they’re dining.

And for the valets, there needs to be a central valet stand for each block on Atwells, not one for each restaurant. The restaurants can pay into it somehow, but they cause more problems with traffic and the people who work the valet don’t give any regard to traffic laws.

Does Bit Torrent make you a server?

Published on August 25, 2007 in Internet, Music, Software and Technology. Closed

There’s a current thread on the NYCheads email discussion list (which can be found at Google Groups, for those of you in the NYC area who want some decent music discussion, though it tends to revolve around NYC and jam bands and the like) regarding OptOnline’s and Comcast’s TOS prohibiting you to be a “server”. The issue that started was Comcast banning Bit Torrent because it makes your computer a server. Some feel that peer-to-peer software does not make your computer a server, though Comcast, and most ISP’s, would probably disagree with that. Though the discussion is still fairly young, and I’m sure more people will add their 2 cents to it, I added mine…

P2P represents a grey area in the client/server relationship. I’m going to start off with the normal P2P apps (the original Napster, Gnutella, KaZaA, BearShare, etc). These types of applications work in a way very close to the normal client/server relationship. One user logs onto the P2P network, searches for a file name/song/artist/whatever, and is then presented with a list of computers logged onto the same network that are sharing said file (or files that come up in the search). The user searching then finds the file he wants and chooses to download it. In this type of relationship, the user’s computer is the client and the computer that is hosting the file is very clearly the server. What makes this slightly grey is that the host’s computer can also be acting as a client in downloading other files from other users on the network. However, that does not break the normal the client/server relationship because a client is initiating the download of a file.

Enter Bit Torrent… All ideas of the normal client/server relationship with regards to P2P have changed. The grey areas have become greyer and the lines between client and server have been severely blurred. When a computer connects to a torrent, it starts downloading bits and pieces of the file, not necessarily in any particular order, from all the other computers connected to that same torrent. However, it then goes and sends bits and pieces of that file to the other computers connected that don’t already have those bits and pieces. This is all tracked by well… a tracker, which is a server that notifies the computers connected to the torrent that the file exists and keeps track of which computers have which parts of the file and how much of the file they have. The lines get blurred with whether or not the computer is pushing out the file, or uploading it to the other computers, or if the other computers are downloading it. The initiation of the downloading/uploading is less clear than in the case of the standard P2P software, making it unclear whether or not your computer has become a server while connected to a torrent.

From the standpoint of the ISP, Comcast and OptOnline in this case, but certainly not limited to them as Cox also has rules against running servers (which I was able to do for the longest time and one day they just started blocking ports, yet don’t advertise that they block those ports), you are most definitely running a server no matter what kind of P2P software you are using, assuming you are sharing files, which Bit Torrent does by default. From the standpoint of the end user, you are not running a server because you are merely uploading those files (or bits of files) to others and not actually running the server. The idea being that with Bit Torrent, it’s a mutually agreed upon situation and the initiation happened at the same time. Regardless of which side you believe, Bit Torrent has blurred the lines of the client/server relationship and has certainly made things lots of fun for network administrators. The one great thing about Bit Torrent, and its biggest strength, is that it represents exactly what the internet was created for… sharing. If people didn’t share, the internet would not have been a success.

For more discussion like this and for some pretty good music discussion, check out NYCheads. I’m still a member, though I have moved away from the NYC area (not that I was every really in it, but I was much closer before).