I’ve finished an initial version of a RSS+BitTorrent integration tool for Radio Userland’s news aggregator. This is beta software, Windows only. If you’ve been following the buzz you might find this interesting. I’ll be writing more about the idea over the next several days. Please leave your comments, bug reports and fixes here.

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  5. IIRC, btdownloadheadless is what you want since it doesn’t show any windows. I don’t know how to invoke it on Windows.

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  8. Code suggestions:

    –use a local variable and the file.getPathChar verb. This will help you make this cross platform much easier. Convention seems to be like this:

    pc = file.getPathChar ()

    –use a check of an existing environment variable instead of a new verb call for system os version. Example:

    if system.environment.isWindows { //ask if Window first – SK
    launch.appWithDocument(user.bitTorrentIntegration.prefs.appPath, pc+ filepath + pc +”–saveas” + bmopath + pc”)}
    else { //now we know it’s a Mac so check for OS9 or OSX
    if system.environment.osVersionString > 9 { // this tells us it’s MacOS X 10.0 or greater–assuming python is installed. Need a graceful way out of this–SK
    local (pythonPath=”/usr/local/bin/python”);
    sys.unixShellCommand (pythonPatah +user.bitTorrentIntegration.prefs.appPath+ “– saveas” + bmopath)}}

    This was all off the top of my head, but it might preserve an easy way for you to do MacOS support. I’m sure I have the syntax of the bittorrent client call wrong–I can’t test it from a Mac right now. There’s a MacOS 9 Python interperter out there and there’s one installed by default on MacOS X 10.3. You could install the developer tools for 10.2 and get one, too.

    More as I think about it. Thanks for writing this, Andrew…

    Steve

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  10. Andrew:

    At home now…

    On MacOS X 10.3.2, the value of system.environment.osVersionString is 16.3.2. It should be easy to determine MacOS X versions from this.

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  11. One way you could do this is to use btlaunchmany.

    You point it at a directory and run it, walk away. Leave it running. Come back and drop torrent files into the directory, and btlaunchmany detects the new torrents and starts downloading. Remove the torrent files, downloading stops.

    This is what I’ve used in my own experiments with RSS and BitTorrent…

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  18. Andrew:

    I’ve narrowed the problem down to how the MacOS X version of Radio handles a file name with multiple periods. On Windows, it takes the last group of letters preceded by a period as the “file extension”, so the LegalTorrents RSS feed presents no problem. On MacOS X, it does something different (I’m still at a loss so far) so it dislikes their .zip.torrent file name scheme. I’m working on a solution–if anyone has ideas, I’m all ears…

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  19. fantastic idea. Two suggestions:

    first, develop a proxy so that you don’t need to open up pinholes in a firewall. I download using multiple machines and I have to keep changing the firewall every time I change machines. It would be nice if this were not the case.

    Second, apply the same concepts to http. Stuff bittorrent information into the response to the initial request and let the browser gather the page from a host of other pages. Would certainly help in the /. effect and eliminate/reduce the need for distributed cache solutions.

    Also emphasizes the need for a nice proxy because again, multiple machines, multiple browsers. can’t go flipping about the pinholes on every little change, can we?

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  20. Andrew:

    The MacOS restriction is filename size: 31 characters is the limit and Radio hits it on the LegalTorrents feed. I’m working a different route and will keep you updated with comments here.

    Steve

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  22. Andrew:

    This application is particularly interesting from the educational point of view. It would make a fantastic distribution method for Educational Learning Objects.

    With this in mind I would like to suggest the possibility of developing it for a simple news aggregrator that has less features than Radio. Radio is good but the use I am thinking of does not need many of its features like the hosted blogging service which is an unnecessary expense. ( Of course some may like to blog as well then Radio would be the perfect choice)

    What would be needed is the ability to determine when the downloads would take place to prevent congestion of school networks.

    The other solution would be a windows version of btlaunchmany.

    Does anyone know if one exists please?

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