Fixer's Journal: Another round on the merry'..

Tuesday I got laid off. My dot-bomb with the short fuse finally detonated. Can't say I was completely suprised, though I would have expected it next month rather than now.

So, to take my mind off of bills, stress, job searches and more stress, I've decided to write a P2P app in Perl. I'm intending it to be a very simple and direct file sharing system, more as a test bed for new ideas rather than as a full blown feature rich system.

I'll eventually post it to my homepage, and perhaps open a sourceforge project on it. The design goals are:

• Simplicity
• Content ignorance
• Anonymity
• Speed

Unfortunately, the network will suffer from bootstrap issues, namely, without a central server of host lists, how do you get in? This isn't really surmountable, so the solution will have to be indirect: Signature lines with hosts:ports, tags on webpages, the P2P equivalent of "Kilroy was here". Possibly also using Freenet as a transmission vector for host lists.

Long term, I hope to apply what I learn to game development. An article on Gamasutra got me to thinking about how to break the client-server bottleneck for MMPORPG's.