In my quest to find a working DAAP implementation, I decided to give the Java version of iLeech a try. I knew that it wouldn't work out of the box, but I figured that Java's networking classes may be more useful/robust than Perl's.

To actually build iLeech, I decided to give Eclipse a try (iLeech uses an extensive package hierarchy that I didn't feel like setting up by hand). It's pretty nice, at least on XP, I've yet to try the OS X build.

Once I got iLeech to build, I first tweaked a couple of things (default to "localhost" for host field, hook up the return key to the connect button, make the "Exit" menu item work) to familiarize myself with both the IDE and the code. Then I tried to enable HTTP 1.1 connection reuse, since that's what seems to prevent current DAAP implementations from connecting to iTunes 4.1. There's supposedly a Java environment variable, http.keepalive, which if set to true will take care of things, but it doesn't seem to work. The current plan is to use the Jakarta Commons HttpClient (part of the Apache project), which seems to be more robust.

Oh, and for the longest time I couldn't connect at all with iLeech to beria, but once I did a traceroute I realized I was past the TTL of 2 limit that iTunes imposes.

Tweaked LRC/DMC movie archive to RSS Perl script to support GUIDs so that NetNewsWire will display deltas when movies are added removed.

Considering ressurecting pTunes as a searching for the campus iTunes Rendezvous sharing community (number of people sharing seems to have doubled since I last checked).

Sounds easy enough, given the existence of OpenDAAP, right? Well, I can't seem to get any of the Perl based tools to work (dapple and a stand-alone script that I found). The Java tools aren't having much luck either.

Hacker interest seems to have dropped since the initial iTunes 4 release in April. I've seen a few references to 4.0.1 requiring a bumped version number, and the necessity of keeping the HTTP/1.1 connection alive (LWP seems to be ignoring my request for this), but then others claim that existing tools should just work as is with 4.1.

Boo.