Having this short domainname (yay!) I early made my own URL shortening service of sorts. It was based on a perl-script I found online, and had a mapping between the keys and the long URL’s in a textfile. Also, I used a subdomain of 42.no for this purpose, namely r.42.no. This wasn’t good enough of course, way too long, so this weekend I wrote my own URL shortening service, using PHP. It stores the keys and URL’s in a database, and supports logging of each lookup done to a short URL. And most importantly, it has an easy interface to add new URL’s, which is something that couldn’t be said for my old text-file solution. Feel free to use it for any of your URL shortening needs.

So without further ado, here it is: http://42.no/r/

Den 19. januar i år tok jeg turen til Parkteatret for å høre Haddy N’Jie med bandet A few good men uten annen bakgrunnskunnskap enn å ha hørt albumet Welcome home på Spotify én gang. Det hender av og til at jeg får et akutt behov for å høre artister live etter å ha hørt noen låter, og jeg er virkelig glad for at jeg gikk på denne konserten!

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I Sandvika, på et lite sted som heter Musikkflekken, spilte to fantastiske artister fredag 28. august 2009 – Lucy Swann og Sandra Kolstad. I omvendt rekkefølge. Siden jeg klarte å forville meg inn på feil sted, kunne det endt med forkortet konsert, men heldigvis fant jeg det ut før konserten startet :-).

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Så var det igjen tid for fenomenet “Buss for bane”. Fra og med i dag 22. juni er linje 5 stengt mellom Vestli og Tøyen. Trafikanten kan fortelle oss at årsaken er:

Årsaken til stengingen har sammenheng med det store arbeidet som utføres i området.
Ulvenveien skal reetableres som en lokalvei, noe som vil gi en direkte forbindelse mellom Løren og Ulven. Ulvenveien vil krysse T-banen på ei bru over dagens stasjonsområde. I denne sammenheng skal Økern T-banestasjon bygges om og oppgraderes betydelig.

Det skal bygges nye ramper og trapper opp til bussholdeplassen på “ny” Ulvenvei. Bussholdeplassen legges rett over T-banesporet, på den nye brua. Deler av perrongen vil bli skiftet ut, da det skal legges rør for vannbåren varme på perrongen for å kunne smelte snø og is. Trapper og ramper mot Økernsentret skal oppgraderes.

og

Dette har sammenheng med at flere av stasjonene langs Grorudbanen i denne perioden skal oppgraderes og moderniseres.

Dette er jo forsåvidt flott. Oppgradering og modernisering av stasjoner er en god ting. Jeg antar vi skal få bedre fasiliteter som nevnt over og sånne fancy sanntids-displayer som viser når t-banen kommer. Det er praktisk.

Selve buss for bane-konseptet derimot, er jeg ikke noen stor tilhenger av. Her er min historie første dag til jobb.

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The magnificent Lucy Swann (NO) played at John Dee tonight, as warmup for another norwegian band called Rover. Her performance was quite short, but it was excellent and well worth the trip! I saw her live at Musikkens dag in Oslo on june 6th, and instantly fell in love. Needless to say, I was excited about this concert, as it’ll most likely be my last chance to see her live in a while.

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[Norwegian - English below]

Les nøye, og bestem deg deretter for hvordan du vil starte morgendagen!

Michael er den typen menneske du elsker å hate. Han er alltid i godt humør, og har alltid noe positivt å si. Når noen spurte ham hvordan han hadde det, pleide han å svare “For å ha det bedre, måtte jeg være tvillinger!”.

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Have you ever had your server drown in processes because a cronjob you wanted to run every minute suddenly never finished, and you ended up having multiple instances of your nice script going at the same time? I have! A quick and easy solution to this problem, was this wrapper-script that I created a while back. Basically, it’s just some pid-file processing before your own code starts, to make sure only to run a single instance of the script at a time. With this you’ll avoid having your scripts pile up again.

The script: cron-shell-script-template.sh
The config: cron-shell-script-template.conf-sample

If you find this script useful, or have some improvements, feel free to drop me a comment below. Thanks!

Update:

The script had a little bug, which caused two instances of the script to be started under some circumstances. The script behind the link above has been updated to correct this.

Update, July 23.:

I’ve removed the PIDDIR-setting from the actual script, and moved it to a separate configuration-file. It’s all generic, the conf-file is expected to be named the same as the script with the last “.ending” replace with “.conf”. The point of this is to be able to e.g. keep the script itself in a repository (like subversion) and keep the config separate so you can update the script from the repository without having local changes to worry about.

An email newsletter from the local concert-scene in Oslo tempted me to visit John Dee to see and hear Amy LaVere from Memphis, Tennessee play on wednesday may 6th. I had never heard about her before, but the mini-review in their newsletter made me stop by her MySpace-page to hear some of her songs. It isn’t (well, wasn’t) not my typical music, but it sounded really good, good enough to warrant a live experience. She plays the contrabass with style, and has a really nice, graceful and slightly rustic voice.

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After getting a new mp3-player (the iAudio D2 from COWON) I wanted to find a quick and easy way of “tagging” and converting a number of albums that I had in flac-format (or mp3) into mp3 of a certain bitrate. My goal was to just browse through my collection, and touch a file inside a directory if I wanted to convert it. When I was done with the touching, I’d just fire up a small script that did all the work for me, while I was doing something else. Here’s what I came up with.

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So, what’s the deal with the airport-security? From what I hear, it’s supposed to be the same in all of Europe, yet every single time I travel, the security-guys tell me different things!

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