MacKuba

It seems that starting a blog was not the only stupid idea I had recently. I’m having more of those… For example, now I’m thinking about learning some Cocoa and writing some applications for the Mac :) I’ve been planning for some time to write something in Qt when I used Linux, but now it seems that although Qt has the advantage of being multi-platform, so I could write something that could be used on Windows, Linux and Mac, the disadvantage is that only a subset of Cocoa widgets are available in Qt; I couldn’t use some of the things I saw in native Mac applications, and because of that, my applications would be less “macish”…

I played a bit with bandwidth limiting tools in MacOSX recently. The reason was that I was uploading huge files to DivShare, and my Firefox took all the available upload bandwidth; and since upload bandwidth happens to be quite useful even when you’re not really uploading anything, everyone at home (including me) had serious problems with using the web at the time. So I thought I could try to force Firefox somehow to limit the maximum upload speed.

I’ve found a plugin which does exactly that, but it was only for Windows… (a plugin for a cross-platform browser which is not cross-platform? come on…). So I started looking for some system-wide solution. I found two pages that explained how to do this – it turns out it’s pretty easy, at least for someone that’s not afraid of the command line.

Everything is done using the ipfw command (IP FireWall?…). First you have to create one or more “pipes” with a constant share of bandwidth assigned:

sudo ipfw pipe <pipe_nr> config bw <amount>kbit/s