Very nice bitrick!
By the way, this patch speeds up initial download quite a lot:
https://github.com/gavinandresen/bitcoin-git/commit/042a619709fab1329e8286c6aedbb2cdc8eb3497
...as do these, which have already been pulled into git head:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/fb45259967032d409bca4d542b55414a7c522fba
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/ec74e8a44338202bfb82faa2cef4611cc37e7fa5