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	<title>Matt's Blog</title>
	<link>http://www.mattkowalczyk.com/blog</link>
	<description>Just another weblog</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Fri, 28 May 2010 00:42:28 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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	<language>en</language>
	
	<item>
		<title>How to Skip Pandora Commercials</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Pandora has extremely intrusive commercials that are repetitive and at times extremely annoying. Most likely this is the case because I'm so tuned into my favorite song that I get excited with anticipation of what the next awesome song will follow. But, instead it's a commercial and my experience is ruined. So, I've discovered a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.mattkowalczyk.com/blog/?p=80</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>scanimage(1) command python wrapper</title>
		<description><![CDATA[To reduce clutter and improve the efficiency of my home-office, I like to digitize all my "important" documents. To accomplish this task, I use a HP All-in-one scanner, an open sourced document management software called KnowledgeTree, and scanimage(1) from the SANE project.
It turns out that scanimage(1) is a fairly cumbersome command line program to use. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.mattkowalczyk.com/blog/?p=66</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Dynamic DNS with nsupdate</title>
		<description><![CDATA[VMs are a perfect framework for exploring and testing new technologies. A recent technology I have been interested in is Hadoop and I wanted to experiment with it in a clustered configuration. Since I have limited hard resources available to construct a cluster, I decided that my nodes will be part of a VM deployment.

To reduce deploy problems, it is prefered that all the nodes in a cluster are as homogenous as possible. To assist in this effort, I have been working a VM clone script based on the information described here. One of my requirnments in deploying identical systems is that cloned VMs should contan a proper DNS entry. After researching this topic, I came to the realization that nsupdate is the right tool. nsupdate is a maintenance utility to perform DNS zone updates.

My next task was to configure my Ubuntu 8.04 DNS bind server to allow for the ability to perform remote dynamic DNS updates (DDNS). The process of configuring nsupdate is pretty straight forward and requires the following modifications to your zone:


zone "my.zone" {
    type master;
    notify no;
    file "/etc/bind/my.zone.zone";
    allow-update { 192.168.0.0/8; 127.0.0.1; };
    journal "/var/lib/bind/my.zone.jnl";
};

The two new entries I had to add were the "allow-update" tag and "journal" tag. I decided that my initial DDNS deployment would use IP-based authentication since my private network security requirnments are not as stringent. However, I believe the correct approach would be to deploy authorization keys as described by this article.

The second element I had to add was the "journal" tag. This was because Ubuntu deploys apparmor which has a configuration for named. The configuration specifies the privileges the named process has on the system. Without the "journal" tag, named was attempting to write the journal file to /etc/bind which the apparmor configuration strictly prohibited. My syslogd would contain the below entry described this error:

client 127.0.0.1#46032: updating zone 'my.zone/IN': error: journal open failed: unexpected error

uoea]]></description>
		<link>http://www.mattkowalczyk.com/blog/?p=48</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Jim Cramer raises Apple (AAPL) target price!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In today's episode of Jim Cramer's Mad Money, Cramer has raised the target price of Apple (AAPL) to $264. This article has a great recap of the todays episode. Cramer states that the FASB is proposing a change in a revenue recognition standard such that it will dramatically increase Apple's reported earnings. Thus, making the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.mattkowalczyk.com/blog/?p=37</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Ubuntu responds to Firefox bug</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Maybe less than a week ago there was a pretty neat event called ConSecWest. It's main purpose is for white hat security researchers to gain recognition for successfully exploiting popular Internet software such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome, among others. A very cool program! Though, I think the researchers deserve more than $5,000 [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.mattkowalczyk.com/blog/?p=20</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Intel Atom!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I've recently decided replace two of my home servers with an Intel Atom system. The Atom is a low-power CPU which comes in various flavors which you can read about at wikipedia.org. What I will tell you about is the huge success that my upgrade has been and how extremely happy I am with this [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.mattkowalczyk.com/blog/?p=19</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Pandora + Replay Media Catcher</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I've recently discovered, when Replay Media Catcher v3.01 downloads Pandora streams, they are saved as a m4a file format. This was rather new as previous versions saved the format as mp3. I've no issues with various formats, but there was a problem. I was hearing the quality of the media degrade severely when playing the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.mattkowalczyk.com/blog/?p=18</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>PNSQC 2008</title>
		<description><![CDATA[For the first time, I had the opportunity to attend the Pacific NW Software Quality Conference (PNSQC) and wanted to share a bit about my experience with anyone interested about the event. The non-profit two day conference took place at the convention center in Portland, OR and was filled by individuals involved in testing from [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.mattkowalczyk.com/blog/?p=16</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>google chrome thoughts</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Everyone with a keyboard has been talking about Google Chrome. After reading so much about it, it's just inevitable that I start pondering my own opinion about the browser. Here is my two cents.
First and foremost, the trend in the next generation of browsers in an unsurprising increase in memory and CPU consumption. For one [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.mattkowalczyk.com/blog/?p=15</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>ubuntu fiesty 7.04 flash</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Okay, so I finally decided to scrap FC7 off my new system.  It all started when I wanted to install PasswordSafe and I couldn't because of gcj.  Anyway, I had to go about and install a newer version of Java and just said, forget it.  Thought to myself that it's about time [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.mattkowalczyk.com/blog/?p=13</link>
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