Transmission is a great BitTorrent client. It is full of features (look at the site!), including bandwidth control, and runs on every platform (Linux and Mac :P).
You can choose global upload and download speeds, or shape single torrents among those you are working with.
At home I have a 10mbit connection to the Internet so I rarely limit the torrents, but most of the time when I do it is to reserve a small quantity of bandwidth for Internet browsing while I wait, or to play online.

Transmission is a bit rigid regarding the possible speeds: the only possible values (for both upload and download) expressed in kilobytes/sec are 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 75, 100, 150, 200, 250, 500, 750, 1000, 1500, 2000. My home network chokes around 600. I could set for 500k, but where’s the fun?

So:

• head to https://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/Building and read thoroughly [the part specifying that you need to have XCode installed, for example]
• learn that “Building the project on Mac requires the source to be retrieved from SVN. Pre-packaged source code will not compile.“
• download the SVN code (uhm, yes. I also have pkgsrc installed):
  svn co svn://svn.transmissionbt.com/Transmission/trunk Transmission
  in my case the version number was 2.11 1133-something.
• run a “dry” compile run — this will guarantee that the code is not broken before you start tinkering with it or that you have some local issue (my first time doing actually something with XCode. Easier than I thought, the source has an XCode project file)
• find the relevant source files (grep was my friend). In the end I only modified Controller.m and TorrentTableView.m: find the line
  const NSInteger speedLimitActionValue[] = { 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 75,
100, 150, 200, 250, 500, 750, 1000, 1500, 2000, -1 };
  and modify it to match the speeds you want to be able to use. You can add or remove values as you like as long as the syntax is right.
• compile it again and run it. :)

If I were a programmer, I’d have implemented something that would allow the user to choose the speed as he liked — but this fits my needs.

Well, I learned (thanks Google) that Snow Leopard does a secure erase of the trash by default. Annoying.
And that I did not realize that until now. Embarassing.

So, this can be solved at least in two ways:

The GUI one
Go into Finder preferences, Advanced, and uncheck “Empty Trash securely”

or

the CLI one
Go into ~/Library/Preferences, convert the Finder preferences to xml (it’s binary by default)
plutil -convert xml1 com.apple.finder.plist
and change the stanza

<key>EmptyTrashSecurely</key>
<true/>
to
<key>EmptyTrashSecurely</key>
<false/>

I grew tired of asking myself what OSX was deleting (the operation can take a while, especially when — as I often do — you’re doing a secure erase) so this ugly one-liner, run as root, will give you the file the OS is working on:


ps auxw | grep -i locum | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs lsof -p | grep -i Trash | awk '{print $9}'


It will output something like this:
/Volumes/FAT80GB/.Trashes/502/xcode3210a432.dmg

You can wrap that command inside the usual while/sleep loop if you want something that keeps you updated on what is going on — or make it an alias for your favourite shell.

Now, no doubt it is handy and user-friendly and automagical and… but I feel it disturbing: if by chance I hand over the laptop to somebody for a quick glance at a web page, for example, she can use it to connect anywhere without my consent — ok, I’m oversimplifying, but you get the idea.

The mistery lies into our old friend ssh-agent: it is spawn using
/System/Library/LaunchAgents/org.openbsd.ssh-agent.plist
[on a single line for yout copying pleasure] as a configuration file and it will cache your passphrase the first time you use ssh.
Up to here it’s fine.

What is troublesome to me is that the default cache time is unlimited (see the man page, this is the default behaviour when it is launched without specifying a “-t” option) therefore it will never forget the passphrase until I logout — being the only user of my laptop, this does not happen often.

Enter the joy of xml configuration files: edit the org.openbsd.ssh-agent.plist, and add the option to your liking, that is change this

<array>
<string>/usr/bin/ssh-agent</string>
<string>-l</string>
</array>

to something like this

<array>
<string>/usr/bin/ssh-agent</string>
<string>-l</string>
<string>-t</string>
<string>120</string>
</array>

if a couple of minutes of “grace period” suit your usage.
Then, just kill the process — it will spawn again the next time you use ssh.

[By the way:
Dear Internet, posting code like the XML up here sucks big time.
It took me more time to format the two snippets to render correctly then writing the whole post.
What do you use to ease this pain?
thank you.]

The Audio Update 2007-001 addresses an issue with version 1.0 of the Mac OS X 10.4.10 Update in which a “popping” sound might be heard with some external speakers on Intel-based Mac. This update is recommended for all Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X 10.4.10.

Update disponibile nei posti soliti, o via SoftwareUpdate (richiede reboot, anche se…

beepbeep:~ zen$ kextstat | grep -i audio
77 4 0x7c4000 0x17000 0x16000 com.apple.iokit.IOAudioFamily (1.6.0b7) <76 35 11>
79 1 0x8ae000 0x4b000 0x4a000 com.apple.driver.AppleFWAudio (2.1.0fc9) <78 77 40 11>
80 0 0x8f9000 0x3000 0x2000 com.apple.driver.AppleMLANAudio (2.1.0fc9) <79 78 40 11>
82 0 0x915000 0x4000 0x3000 com.apple.driver.AudioIPCDriver (1.0.2) <77 5 4 3 2>
102 0 0x9d6000 0xc000 0xb000 com.apple.driver.IOBluetoothSCOAudioDriver (1.9f8) <77 64 11>

rimango dell’idea che un kextunload && kextload potrebbero farlo fare, alle procedurine. :)

Visto che il mio MacBook non lo lascio in mano a nessuno (soprattutto con il mio disco dentro), stasera sono stato cortesemente avvisato che erano arrivate sia la batteria che la tastiera sostitutive (tempo ~4gg in effetti), e di fiondarmi in negozio per la sostituzione visto che a quanto pare hanno delle tempistiche piuttosto strette da rispettare.

Batteria nuova, spettacolo.
Tastiera nuova, spettacolo.
[E qui, il Nostro ammette un concorso di colpa per non averlo fatto notare a chi ha preso nota del problema durante la prima visita, e sostiene di non averci proprio pensato, e che per lui e` naturale avere le {}, le [], la ~ e la \ a portata di mano e non sentire la mancanza delle accentate…]

… aspetta un momento… mi hanno montato una TASTIERA ITALIANA! ARGH!
Sollevo la questione, e il gentilissimo ragazzo che mi ha fatto la sostituzione ha detto che mi richiamera` settimana prossima per ri-trapiantare una tastiera con layout US al suo posto sul Mac. Uff, pero`.

*UPDATE*: Venerdi` scorso (27/07), dopo sole 3 settimane, finalmente mi e` stata restituita una tastiera americana. Ora il mondo gira un po’ piu` rotondo.

Vi ho gia` detto di quanto LLOOGG sia bello, senza zuccheri aggiunti ed aumenti la vostra potenza sessuale se siete omarini? Si`, eh?
Vabbe`, allora vi dico che anche l’ultimo album dei Dream Theater, Systematic Chaos non e` niente male. Molto… “loro-ultimo-periodo”, quindi non aspettatevi di nuovo Images and Words, pero` dopo un primo ascolto pare bello.

PS: feedback richiesto: il fatto che alcune “parole chiave” nel post vengano messe in grassetto vi aiuta? vi infastidisce? non vi fa ne caldo ne freddo? Io ho la mia opinione in proposito, ma sarei curioso di fare un micro sondaggio tra chi legge qui e poi uno piu` ampio.