ozzmosis.com

Back in August 2007 podcast pioneer Dave Slusher requested a method to take an Apple iTunes Music Store (ITMS) podcast link and translate it to return the standard XML feed of a podcast. It didn't take long for me to write a quick and dirty Python program to do the work, but some time late last year Apple changed the file formats returned by the ITMS servers which broke my code.

This morning I rewrote it. You can download it from here.

The basic usage is:

./itunes-url-decoder.py url

Where url is the ITMS podcast link.

For example, the ITMS podcast link to the series of Triple M Get This podcasts is:

./itunes-url-decoder.py "http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=330582773"

As of writing, this returns the following feed URL:

http://www.getthis.net.au/getthis.xml

You can then paste that URL in any podcatching software - no need to use iTunes!

To run itunes-url-decoder.py you will need Python 2.6 (or newer) installed, or a version of Python that provides the plistlib library.

category: /tech

The ozzmosis.com web site is currently being reconstructed as a blog, with a new layout. Some content may be missing temporarily, but I'm hoping not to break too many of the old links in the long term.

Also in the long term, I'm hoping to write a lot more!

The old site is temporarily at http://old.ozzmosis.com/

Update: Phew, done. All the old stuff should be integrated into the new format now. Will leave the old site running for a little while though in case I've forgotten something...

category: /tech

"In Windows XP, you can get Explorer to exit cleanly by getting to the shutdown dialog (e.g., Start / Turn Off Computer, or Start/Shutdown), then hold down the Ctrl+Alt+Shift keys and click the "Cancel" button."

- http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/archive/2007/07/17/how-to-cleanly-stop-explorer-exe-on-windows-vista.aspx

category: /tech

Today the site underwent a long overdue facelift, and I'm no longer using AsciiDoc for page generation. I'll continue to work on updating some of the pages as time permits, as some of the information (eg. Useful software) is now terribly out of date.

category: /tech