Just waiting to move from one project to the next. To break the ennui, I've started experimenting with a less resource-intensive alternative to Azureus. I finally settled on rtorrent - it's a really neat ncurses-based torrent client, has a very small memory footprint (less than 50M when it's cranking, and that's including shared libs), and can be conveniently run in a screen session (making it easy to check from anywhere). Furthermore it can be almost entirely event-driven so it's really easy to write hooks however you like. As an example, it's easy to define hot-drop folders for torrents, and when a torrent is deleted the program stops dl'ing / seeding. Very very cool.
So, Azureus has a few features that I really need - mainly SafePeer and RSSFeed. To replace SafePeer I've installed MoBlock - it's an extremely lightweight PeerGuardian-esque tool that works as a set of iptables queuing rules. So far it's been working out well for me, the only drawback is that I haven't found a good place to automatically check for updates to the p2p file, but I expect to have that sorted soon.
So, all that was left was RSSFeed. And, believe it or not, nobody seems to have written this yet. There is a Perl GTK client for this, but the whole point is to be light and (preferably) gui-free. And, oddly enough, nobody seems to have written a text-based client for this - what I wanted was something that could be daemonized, because further down the line I would like to have this all as part of the startup scripts for my home server.
I was able to find this script on the Interweb, and I've heavily bastardized it to fit my own needs. At some point I will probably re-write the whole thing entirely (since it now bears little resemblance to the original script), and then maybe release it into the wild. Let me know if you're interested in trying it out (it's still Perl, so theoretically it should work on a Windows box, although I don't know how useful anyone else would find it). It's definitely been a fun little project to work on.
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