BeNOW.ca has been around in various forms for many years. It started out in 1999 as a streaming audio project of Ivan (my roommate at the time) and myself. For the next few years the streaming was the focus as we joined up with Jonnay, Shelly and the rest of the Genesis 309 crew. Around 2002 I whipped up a web frontend to a database constructed from the track information from ripped CDs. The stream was then dynamic, randomly playing selections until someone wanted to hear something specific. Around that time the remote DJ interface was surfaced to the web and worked well. DJ's could hijack the stream without the listeners being dropped and a weekly schedule was attempted for a while. It was great stuff, but there was rarely enough bandwidth and it was never popular enough to snowball into something big. The streaming dropped out around 2003 orso.
I missed it, so in 2004 started restreaming CJSW (University of Calgary radio), as their stream at the time was a pitiful low bitrate realaudio attempt. I got the gear together and rebroadcast 24/7 encoding from an FM receiver. I approached CJSW about getting serious about it, and I researched colocation facilities and found veryserv... coincidently just across the street from the university. I agreed to look after their stream in exchange for free reign on the server, which is where BeNOW.ca is hosted. The hardware and plans have been upgraded several times and it's now a kickass box on a kickass pipe. Streaming is now coming directly off the mixing board at CJSW and is broadcast in various bitrates including a can-hear-dj-breath-on-mic 160k stream... one of the highest fidelity internet streams out there. I host several sites (for myself and others) on the box, and there is room for more. I choose to host fewer site in order to pay close attention to them... to help out with problems and configure environment exactly as required. The hosting has improved to the point of being very good, imho.
During the initial streaming period, and certainly since, I've been focussed on coding and things tech related. Tech ramblings became the norm, and around 2006 orso, I started not translating for the laymen. Most of the topics require a bit of desire on the part of the reader to be understood... as they should. Often the topics are not easy to make laymen friendly. The site is the public frontend to the BeNOW APIs, a large set of tools for various tasks. The APIs grew as solutions were needed for work and play and there is now well over 80,000 lines of publicly available code (mostly Java) totaling over 21 man years of effort estimated to cost ~$3 million (sloccount sept 2007)... I've been busy. Several of these APIs come together in an application, such as this web site. Most of the APIs are GPL licensed to encourage public use and tinkering (use with other freely available code), but are relicensed to LGPL (use with proprietary code) for any of my development contracts. If you like what you see and have an itch you want professionally scratched check out my resume and contact me. I might be able to fit you in. For others who would like to use the APIs, go for it, and let me know how you make out... I'm here if you need a hand.
Since the early streaming days there has been an IRC server running at benow.ca, and since 2005 BeBOT has been hanging around, listening and grabbing URLs. Over the years it has quietly grabbed well over 5000 URLs, which are available to be browsed. It's quite the little honeypot. Join the chat, because everyone else isn't.
If you have any questions or comments, fire me an email.