Gamete Intrafallopian Transfer (GIFT)

A technique used to improve the chances of a woman becoming pregnant in the case of infertility. Several egg cells, stimulated to mature simultaneously with fertility drugs, are removed from the woman's ovary, mixed with her husbands sperm, and inserted into one of her Fallopian tubes, where fertilization can occur.

From their website: gift.sf.net (or www.giftproject.com)

giFT, general interface to FastTrack (or giFT isn't FastTrack) is a client that uses the Kazaa/Morpheus/Grokster peer-to-peer file sharing network. It is intended to be used under Linux.

The FastTrack network (http://www.fasttrack.nu/) is a peer-to-peer network for sharing files. It provides search facilities and has a 2 level hierarchical scheme for organizing peers.

Being a peer-to-peer network, there is no central server during normal operation. All communication is done between peers. However, three companies which have written software clients to the FastTrack network (Morpheus, KaZaA, Grokster) each do in fact have their own central server, that deals with (1) registration/login, (2) sending advertisements, and (3) informing your client where to find peers on the FastTrack network.

This program, giFT, is the generic interface to FastTrack. It is intended to be interoperable with existing clients, and to speak a protocol compatible with that of the FastTrack network in order to communicate with peers. This program's reason for existing is as a compatible, interoperable, open source, Linux-based peer for the network.

Unlike the existing clients, giFT rarely uses a central server. It does not require registrations or logins, and is not trying to show users advertisements. The issue of locating network peers is discussed later on. In particular, giFT does not contact the Morpheus, KaZaA, or Grokster central servers at all.

giFT is Open Source.


At the moment I write this, giFT is being blocked by the new KaZaA / Morpheus clients.

giFT isn't FastTrack, so eventually there's going to be a whole new p2p network attached to it.

There is also an irc channel: #gift @ irc.sf.net

Two... Five... Zero... Zero... Zero... JIHAD

"Gift" was the first and only album by the Sisterhood. The Sisterhood were a pseudo-band formed by Andrew Eldritch after the first lineup of the Sisters of Mercy imploded in 1985. When Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams left the Sisters to do their own thing, their first project was a very short tour of Europe under the name the Sisterhood. Eldritch's immediate response was to dedicate two weeks to recording an album ironically called Gift and release it under the same name so he could sue Hussey at the same time they were already fighting over the rights to the SOM name. (Hussey and Co. were forced to rename themselves the Mission, which was fine and cool but the Americans already had a band called the Mission, which was bad.)

Musically, "Gift" is one of the least interesting things ever done by any member of the Sisters of Mercy, but it's not unlistenable. It is a full-length album consisting of five very long tracks of loopy electro/goth nonsense, of which three are fair to pretty good and two are just trash. One of the good ones is the VERY good "Giving Ground". The whole thing is done with a lot of sample loops and very basic drum machines, and sounds a lot like any mid-Eighties science fiction soundtrack. "Jihad" in particular sounds like somebody's bad idea of Fewteristic Music, at something like eleven minutes of techno slush.

Both Andrew Eldritch and James Ray are credited for vocals on Gift, and much noise has been made about the fact that Ray sounds uncannily like Eldritch (much like about a million other semi-talented Goth bands to come in the next ten years...) but there is also a rumour that Eldritch never sang at all on the album.

The other artists credited as "the Chorus of Vengeance" on this album are Lucas Fox, Alan Vela, and the Gun Club's Patricia Morrison, who was also part of the next Sisters of Mercy lineup. Doktor Avalanche is also credited, but for some reason none of the sampling machines are.

What you have lost can never be found
words are just dust in deserts of sound
everything is lost and your trust lies broken
and the truth is found...

Tracks:

  1. Jihad - a terrible track to open an album with, this "song" features the lyrics 'Two... Five... Zero... Zero... Zero... Jihad'. This may or may not have some meaning.
  2. Colours - eleven minutes later, the patient listener is rewarded with some decent music. A newly recorded version of this song was later used as one of two bonus tracks on the CD version of "Floodland".
  3. Giving Ground - best song on the album. Could easily have been another Floodland track.
  4. Finland Red, Egypt White - ACK! Another insult to listeners. The title refers to colours found on AK-47 ammunition in various countries. The track is just a man reading a lot of information from a manual about AK-47 rifles. From time to time, the words 'destroying personnel...' are repeated to give the song a semblance of deeper meaning. It doesn't work.
  5. Rain from Heaven - the only song on the album that features a full production with background singers and all, this is a nicely atmospheric track that really starts to develop the ideas presented in Floodland.

As the water flows over the bridge,
as we walk on the floodland,
as we walk on the water, we forget

I made this night for you:
crafted every star,
brushed the sky’s velvet nap to be
now black as loneliness,
now deepest blue.

I smoothed the edges of the moon,
marked its face with thumbprints,
made it shimmer,
so you would smile.

I dappled the grass with moisture
to wash your feet,
and hung the scent of magnolia
over the darkened paths.

I hushed the traffic
to hear you breathe, and called
the trickle of wind
that lifts your hair.

I made this night for you
and it is almost wonderful enough
to be worthy.

(The stuff above is horribly outdated.)

In the beginning of P2P stuff, there was Napster. It went down. Nobody likes a centralized server.
Then there was Gnutella. It's still there, but it was damn slow and bandwidth-consuming, and is still slow even after updates.
Then there was AudioGalaxy, which later met the fate of Napster - because it still was the same model of operation, even when they tried to play nice with the record companies. Then there was Morpheus, and KaZaA, and other FastTrack networks. But none of them worked in Linux and liked to disclose the protocol.
So there was an inspiration...

...

So much for informal, probably inaccurate and largely omitting history of Peer-to-peer file trading.

The giFT project originated as giFT Isn't FastTrack. Since the FastTrack networks (which at time included Morpheus and KaZaA, probably some others too) didn't want to cooperate with open development, the project folks reverse-engineered the giFT protocols, and found them pretty neat. They announced that giFT interoperates with the networks at full battle speed. Then, FastTrack changed the protocol. giFT soon caught up. Then, they decided "Ewww, those evil hackers keep making things that play nice with us, let's make our proggies centrally authenticated." the record companies thought, "What a boneheaded move, let's sue 'em and shut them down!" and giFT folks went "Yeah, that truly was an idiotic move, let's just make our own network that uses the ideas of the old FastTrack network."

So, then giFT became GNU Internet File Transfer, which (obviously due to RMS' gentle suggestion to either give the copyrights to FSF or change the name?) was changed to giFT Internet File Transfer.

These days, giFT is under heavy development, and it is getting much nicer and nicer over time.

...

The first time I used giFT was when it was just a FT frontend. I remember being able to connect to the network and search for stuff, but downloading didn't work. Then, afterwards, after the FT's move to centralization, it needed to find other peers by port-scanning, which I thought was not nice.

I remember the first time I checked out the "new" giFT. Napster was down, Audiogalaxy was severely blocking stuff (but fortunately still letting me to download some hideously obscure stuff, which I was actually looking for), people had recommended eDonkey 2000 but I never got it working properly, and LimeWire was a slowish way to download stuff from Gnutella. I installed giFT, found a client, and...

...it worked.

I searched for a file. It returned me a bunch of stuff. I told it to download. It downloaded fast and without problems. My DSL thingy didn't act like a 56k modem at this time.

Incredible.

...

These days, the giFT system can be divided to many parts:

  • Client
  • Server
  • Server plugins
  • The network

The server is the most central part of giFT. You download, compile (if required), configure and start up the server on your own machine. The server loads up its plugins, reads the configuration, and connects to all of the networks you want.

The most important network, the "native" network of giFT, is the OpenFT network. OpenFT is based on the ideas of the old FT network, as mentioned: There's two protocols, the server-to-server protocol to route queries and stuff, and the file download protocol, which just conviniently happens to be HTTP.

Basically, each OpenFT node also runs its own web server, by default on port 1216. If you access http://localhost:1216/ on your own machine, you get a beautiful server status page and by following the link you get a list of files you share. You can disable the directory listing for other hosts, of course.

OpenFT supports "swarming" downloads (that is, downloading small bits of file from multiple sources at once) using HTTP range features.

The plugins can be written in C or Perl or perharps other languages in the future. These allow the server to connect to other networks - the most prominent plugin is the OpenFT plugin. Gnutella plugin ships with giFT and is compiled with it (though not enabled by default, but it's easy to get it running). Others are planned. In theory, it's possible to make the giFT daemon to connect to Gnutella, all those OpenNap servers from Napigator lists you've always dreamed of searching at once, and your brother's FTP servers, and thus making the daemon to give uniform, singly searchable interface to all of them, at once. Which leads us to the next topic...

The client is the dumbest part of the chain. The client basically asks search results from the server, and tells the server to download the file. The server does the actual downloading and searching on each network - the client just needs to present the users some way of seeing the things they want to find, and showing the users how the downloads are proceeding. There are many kinds of clients for different environments. My favorites are giFTcurs, which is a console-based client, and giFToxic, which is based on GTK+.

A few words of the culture: it seems that giFT network is still a bit "geeky" - in order to use it you don't just download and use it, if you're using Windows you need to fetch the thing from CVS and compile the thing (mingw32 works), and if you're using a *NIX variant you need to... er, fetch the thing from CVS and compile the thing. (There are actual releases nowadays and it's even in Debian, but you may still want to stick with CVS version...) I'm able to find a lot of DivX stuff of science fiction and Japanese animation, and a surprising amount of good music in .ogg format, not to even mention the abundance of MP3s. People looking for Windows warez probably want to stay far away, but people like me who just want to find movies and music that are harder to find are in much more luck. I also found it a great place to find game ROMs from...

It should also be remembered that giFT with OpenFT, when run as a purely user node, doesn't need too much bandwidth (when I'm idle, my net card monitor seems strangely quiet for most of the time), which makes it good one to run alongside other file sharing daemons.

Project homepage (same thing, same place):
http://www.giftproject.org/
http://gift.sourceforge.net/

(2003-10-27: Thanks to RPGeek for reminding me of Gnutella plugin. These days, I mostly use eMule, but giFT is still very cool - always among the first things where I look stuff from.)


Limited by income and imagination,
I handed her my shy birthday present,
prefaced it with awkward hands in Levi pockets
along with apologies for what it was not.

Inside the cheap wrapping paper
in a small cardboard box
a handful of pebbles
(some quite attractive, I thought).

It's for throwing against my window
you know? If you ever need me late at night.

I stole the idea from the Beav and am guessing
Wally would have been envious of her reaction

Gift (?), n. [OE. gift, yift, yeft, AS. gift, fr. gifan to give; akin to D. & G. gift, Icel. gift, gipt, Goth. gifts (in comp.). See Give, v. t.]

1.

Anything given; anything voluntarily transferred by one person to another without compensation; a present; an offering.

Shall I receive by gift, what of my own, . . . I can command ? Milton.

2.

The act, right, or power of giving or bestowing; as, the office is in the gift of the President.

3.

A bribe; anything given to corrupt.

Neither take a gift, for a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise. Deut. xvi. 19.

4.

Some quality or endowment given to man by God; a preeminent and special talent or aptitude; power; faculty; as, the gift of wit; a gift for speaking.

5. Law

A voluntary transfer of real or personal property, without any consideration. It can be perfected only by deed, or in case of personal property, by an actual delivery of possession.

Bouvier. Burrill.

Gift rope Naut, a rope extended to a boat for towing it; a guest rope.

Syn. -- Present; donation; grant; largess; benefaction; boon; bounty; gratuity; endowment; talent; faculty. -- Gift, Present, Donation. These words, as here compared, denote something gratuitously imparted to another out of one's property. A gift is something given whether by a superior or an inferior, and is usually designed for the relief or benefit of him who receives it. A present is ordinarly from an equal or inferior, and is always intended as a compliment or expression of kindness. Donation is a word of more dignity, denoting, properly, a gift of considerable value, and ordinarly a gift made either to some public institution, or to an individual on account of his services to the public; as, a donation to a hospital, a charitable society, or a minister.

 

© Webster 1913.


Gift, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Gifted; p. pr. & vb. n. Gifting.]

To endow with some power or faculty.

He was gifted . . . with philosophical sagacity. I. Taylor.

 

© Webster 1913.

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