tjansson.dk

I recently finished university and got a job which has increased my cash flow quite a bit. Beside putting some money aside I also decided that it was time for some new gadgets. Below is the items I have decided to buy, but if I could justify the expense I would also have bought a Intel X25-M Mainstream Solid State Drive – 34nm Product Line 80 GB for the 200MB/s throughput and a Samsung SyncMaster 2233RZ for the 120Hz.

HP ProCurve Switch 1400-8G
I have a server with all my home files shared through NFS and for a while it has annoyed that 100Mps networks only support around 12MB/s when working on images and doing backups. So I decided that a Gigabit speed was about time. I would have loved to have all 8 ports in a router but such routers are expensive and I would most likely have had to give up the DD-WRT firmware which I enjoy on my WRT54GL. I chose this over switch over some less expensive models as it is reported to have great performance and not to get as hot as other models.
edbpriser.dk

Corsair XMS2 2×2GB

I am planning on doing more work on virtual machines and running the x86_64 version of Ubuntu 9.10 so I bought 4GB of somewhat good memory. edbpriser.dk

ATI Radeon HD 5850 graphics card

I currently have a ATI X1950XT card which have served me well but I have some problem running as smooth as I like in games with a resolution of 1920×1080. I have already decided to buy the ATI Radeon HD 5850 graphics card but currently it is sold out from all internet shops in Denmark, so I guess I have to wait a while. edbpriser.dk
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Introduction
Just a few weeks ago I used Amarok to download podcasts to my mp3 player but since I have a server running 24/7 i figured that I could use my bandwidth more sensible. Using podget I can make my server download the most recent podcasts into a specific folder a certain time during the night. The is both easier for me and reduces the load on my network connection during the day hours.

Setup
Installation on Ubuntu or Debian based Linux distributions are as always a breeze:

root@nobel:~# aptitude install podget

Starting podget at the shell for the first time will create two files, namely .podget/podgetrc and .podget/serverlist. Note the period in front. The first file configures how and where to store the podcasts and the second file sets which podcasts to download and how to categorize them.

The first thing to edit is .podget/podgetrc. The most important setting to change is the dir_library:

# Name of Server List configuration file
config_serverlist=serverlist
 
# Directory where to store downloaded files
dir_library=/home/tjansson/Music/podcasts
...

This is the content of my .podget/serverlist. As it can be seen I provied the url, the category and a name of the podcast.

# Default Server List for podget
# FORMAT:    <url> <category> <name>
# NOTES:
#    1. The Category must be one word without spaces.  You may use underscores.
#    2. Any spaces in the urls needs to be converted to %20
#    3. Disable the downloading of any feed by commenting it out with a #.
#    4. If you are creating ASX playlists, make sure the feed name does not
#       have any spaces in it.
# Find more servers at: http://www.ipodder.org/directory/4/podcasts
http://podcast.dr.dk/p1/rssfeed/alle_tiders_historie.xml DR Alle-tiders-historie
http://podcast.dr.dk/p1/rssfeed/dokumentartimen.xml DR Dokumentartimen
http://podcast.dr.dk/p1/rssfeed/feature.xml DR Feature
http://podcast.dr.dk/p1/rssfeed/harddisken.xml DR Harddisken
http://podcast.dr.dk/p1/rssfeed/orientering.xml DR Orientering
http://podcast.dr.dk/p1/rssfeed/Radioklassikeren.xml DR Radioklassikeren
http://podcast.dr.dk/p1/rssfeed/videnskabens_verden.xml DR Videnskabens-verden

The final step is to setup a cronjob to run podget every night, so I run

tjansson@nobel:~# crontab -e

and set the podget command to be run every night at 3:00

# m h  dom mon dow   command
0 3 * * * /usr/bin/podget -s

Introduction
Beside monitoring my server with Munin, see Server monitoring with Munin. I was still watching the logfiles on my server every now and then. However there are many logfiles and as a human I am prone to be overwhelmed by the shear noise. The solution was to install logwatch. Now I receive an mail every day in nicely formated html informing about uncommon lines in my logs.

Extract from a logwatch report

Introduction
For a while my good friend Kåre Hartvig Jensen and I have been coding on a project called sinthgunt. Sintgunt started out as a python pet-project for the two of us to learn creating GUI’s using python-gtk. As it is almost always the case development is very fast in python and quickly we had created something useful. In fact we found it so useful that we believe others would benefit from our work and hence we published the code on www.sinthgunt.org

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