Call-Me-Kenneth
The first part of ”The Animatrix“ (the anime-style prequel to The Matrix) hit the net yesterday. Even after a day’s worth of flash traffic, the server was still dog slow.
Fortunately an article on the Boing Boing RSS feed pointed me in the direction of a BitTorrent tracker at scarywater.net
I’ve never had reason to use BitTorrent before. But then, I’d never used
VCDs before The Phantom Menace. It’s sci-fi rather than porn that’s the real driving force behind underground communication technologies.
Of course, my first experience is disappointing. The Mac OSX client bombs
out without any useful error message. So I apt-get the latest .deb.
Of course it fails the can I use it without reading the documentation test. And as with most packages I need to read the manifest before I have any idea of how to invoke it.
btdownloadheadless.py –url http://a.scarywater.net/slashdot/animatrixlgfinal_dl_mov.torrent –saveas=/var/tmp/animatrixlgfinal_dl.mov
resulting in the following output
saving: animatrixlgfinal_dl.mov (141.4 MB)
percent done: 89.1
time left: 8 min 05 sec
download to: /var/tmp/animatrixlgfinal_dl.mov
download rate: 16.6 kB/s
upload rate: 777.1 kB/s
(the scary upload rate being the result of a second client running locally.)
Not too painful, but I’m the sort of person who doesn’t like to leave terminals open when they’re not being used, and for this software to work you need to encourage users to leave the app running.
Ideally I’d like to see this as a Gnome panel applet with little indicators for download/upload. Already, work is being put into a more Gui-centric port: BT++
