% ls -l /var/run/[wu]tmp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root  utmp  364366464 Aug 13 22:00 utmp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root  utmp  1743665280 Aug 13 22:10 wtmp

That's 350 megs and 1.7 gigs. Cute. Performance sucks for anything needing utmp (w, uptime, top, etc). The 'init' process is spending tons of time chewing through cpu. System %cpu usage says 38% and is holding there on a mostly idle machine.

Lots of these in /var/log/messages:

Aug 13 22:10:27 domU-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX /sbin/mingetty[6843]: tty3: No such file or d
irectory
Aug 13 22:10:27 domU-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX /sbin/mingetty[6844]: tty4: No such file or d
irectory
Aug 13 22:10:27 domU-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX /sbin/mingetty[6845]: tty5: No such file or d
irectory
Aug 13 22:10:27 domU-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX /sbin/mingetty[6846]: tty6: No such file or d
irectory
Aug 13 22:10:32 domU-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX /sbin/mingetty[6847]: tty2: No such file or d
irectory

I'm not sure why /dev/tty1 is the only /dev/ttyN device, but whatever. Either way, mingetty flapping will flood /var/run/[ubw]tmp over the span of weeks and eventually you end up with a system that spends most of its time parsing that file and/or restarting mingetty.

I fixed this by commenting out all tty entries in /etc/inittab and running "init q":

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
#1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
#2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
#3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
#4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
#5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
#6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

Amazon provides lots of web services. One of these is it's E-Commerce API which allows you to search it's vast product database (among other things).

In Pimp, the page for any given listening station shows you the current song being played. Along with that, I wanted to provide the album cover for the current track.

You can leverage Amazon's API to search for a given artist and album eventually leading you to the picture of the album cover. To this end, I wrote a little python module that lets you search for an artist and album name combination and will give you a link to the album cover.

So, I wrote albumcover.py as a prototype to turn an artist and album into a url to the album cover image. It works for the 20 or so tests I've put through it.