Blog What I Made

Microformats, Tails Export, Bluetooth

I was recently sent a link to this article. It basically describes an application that has been launched by the Bluetooth SIG that allows you to “embed a chunk of data … in a web page and have it copied to a mobile phone at the click of a mouse”. Although I must say I didn’t RTFA I did think to myself “What’s the point in this? Why not just link to a vCard, download it then send it to your phone?” I basically decided that all it did was convert a 2 step process (download file, send file by bluetooth) into a 1 step process.

After thinking about it a bit more (and, yes, still not reading the article, I’m very much of the slashdot generation) I realised that there was a bit of a similarity between this and microformats. I got to thinking about knocking up a program that would skim over a web page, pull out all the microformats on it, and allow you to send these using bluetooth. After a mention from Andy Hume and a visit to the WSG Meetup on Microformats I decided to have a go at hacking this support into tails export (edit: a great Firefox extension that already exists for pulling microformats out of a page and exporting them to your computer).

One slight problem I had to start with was that the export feature of tails export doesn’t actually work with OS X. Tails export appears to work by creating a file containing your event or address information, then setting the URL of the browser to point at that file. Quite ingenious really, it saves having to worry about what program to load the file in as the browser should take over and load the file in whatever program you have setup to handle it on your system. Unfortunately that doesn’t appear to work on OS X. On a mac, on the command line, we have the nice ‘open’ command which does exactly what we want, opens a file in the associated program. So all I needed to do was figure out how to make tails export use that when run on a mac. After spending a frustrating few hours on a train on Friday night trying to research this using the Opera mini browser on my phone, I finally found the solution on Saturday morning. “nsIProcess” is an XPCOM component that you can use to fire off programs from within a Mozilla based browser. I found a handy example online and then managed to add the support to tails export without too many problens (ok, maybe there was an hour of trying to figure out why it wouldn’t open in the Bluetooth File Exchange app which turned out to be because I was passing a file:// URL).

So, that’s about it, I’ve packaged up a new version of tails export, you can download/install it as tailsexport-0.3.1-jmck.xpi (update: see bottom of article). I make no guarantees for the reliability of this extension, if it blows up your computer and deletes all your blog postings, I’m taking no responsibility. This is the first time I’ve touched a Mozilla/Firefox extension so I have no idea if I’ve done things the right way. That said, it works nicely for me, my Sony Ericcson k750i works well with the vCards though unfortunately doesn’t seem to accept the iCal stuff. I’ll let Robert de Bruin know and see if he’d like to add my changes to the official build.

As a last note I thought I’d mention that I did eventually read the article that I’ve linked to right at the top of this page. I thought I should before writing this blog posting just in case it turned out that the application was doing something amazingly clever that I’d just missed. What they appear to be doing is having developers include a JS file on their page, then when users click the “TransSend” button some JS has to be run to either pick the bits of information out of the page and construct a vCard on the fly, or use a pre-built hardcoded vCard (I haven’t yet found docs on how to embed TransSend stuff yourself though, just looked at the examples). This seems like a really nasty solution to me though and I really wish they had heard about Microformats at the Bluetooth SIG. Microformats look like the perfect solution for them, just a shame they are a bit behind the times!

Update! 26th October 2006 - As I mentioned above the extension didn’t work for exporting calendar events to my phone. As it turns out it didn’t work for sending vCards to Nokia phones either (thanks Stuart for testing that). I’ve put small updates in to fix these problems which you can find in tails-export-0.3.1-jmck2.xpi. The calendar events problems were caused by a file extension problem, my phone only accepts .vcs not .ics so I’ve simply changed the file extension for now. Also the Nokia problem was due to bad line endings, I’ve fixed this using a JS replace but hopefully I’ll fix this in a better way when I update to Brian Suda’s latest XSL.

Update 2! 26th October 2006 - It seems Nokia phones are still having problems which appear to be due to a lack of support for URIs for the PHOTO value (and possibly other values). Also note that there are character set issues too, but these should be fixed when I update to the newer XSL.

Technorati tags: microformats, bluetooth, firefox

Resizing brs Across Domains

While recently looking into Google Gadgets and pondering on the possibility of an open gadgets API that allowed you to place gadgets on your own site that were hosted elsewhere, I came up with a method that can be used for resizing brs where the page within the br is hosted on a different domain.

A simple search for “resizing brs” on Google returns 581,000 results, and the first one that I found gave a perfectly reasonable method for resizing brs when all the content is stored on a single domain. Unfortunately due to the security restrictions in modern browsers, JavaScript in a page hosted on one domain cannot access a page hosted on an alternative domain, even if you really really want it to. But there is a way to allow communication.

So first, before I describe the solution I’ll mention a caveat - this solution relies on the page in the br doing something. This means you can’t have resizable brs for just any content - either you have to have control of the content in the br or its owner has to make functionality available to you, but I think that’s a good security restriction. You have to trust the content you’re linking to if you’re going to implement this.

So - on to the solution. Put an br in your br. That’s it, that’s all you need to do. Come back next week for how to make Windows completely safe from viruses and Mac OS popular………..

What? You want more details? How about if I tell you to make the inner br link to something in the main window’s domain, does that help?

The diagram above aims to show you what I mean by this. You can also see this example in action. The main page in the example is served by the host mcknut.googlepages.com. It in turn has an br on it with some content from www.johnmckerrell.com. The three links inside the br try three different methods for resizing the br.

• The first link tries to simply access the parent window directly. This will not work on any modern browsers as it will be flagged as a security violation.
• The second link tries the best solution. There is a hidden br inside the main br. When you click on the second link br-resize1.html is loaded into the hidden br from mcknut.googlepages.com. br-resize1.html is passed a height value from the main br and then using JavaScript can access the main window, instructing it to resize the br. This is not flagged as a security risk because the domain of the page in the hidden br is the same as that of the main window.
• The third link tries another alternative which also works, but is slightly more cumbersome. This version loads the resizing page in the main br. The resizing page is served from the same domain as the main page and calls some JavaScript on the main page to resize the br. It then uses a callback mechanism to return the br to the original page. This is more cumbersome as it has to reload the content in the br, and would not be suitable for an br with dynamic content that might need resizing numerous times.

So, to wrap up, the second solution mentioned above is the ideal way, as it resizes the br without affecting the content within it. I see a definite security problem here if you have multiple brs with content from multiple domains in, as you might find that any br would end up with the ability to impersonate any other br. I think this could be solved though by labelling the brs using random strings and using these strings when communicating from br to main page. I’m also not entirely sure about the validity of the window.parent.parent.updatebr() line. As you can see from the diagram below, it looks like I’m being allowed to cross domains in my JavaScript which of course should not be possible. If this turns out to be a security violation that browsers are likely to fix, though, I think window.top.updatebr() would suffice in most circumstances, and should in theory be fine.

Please leave comments to let me know what you think of this solution. I’ve not been able to find it in use anywhere else but if you’ve seen something similar before then let me know. Also if you have any suggestions for improvements I’d be happy to hear them. I’ve been intending to have a go at a mechanism to allow two way communication between the br and the main page (currently you still wouldn’t be able to pass information into the br from the main page) but I haven’t had time to knock something up so if you do, let me know.

New Blog, Old Blog

So I’ve decided to replace my previous blog with a standard WordPress blog.

My previous blog made use of whizzy fun modern technologies to allow me to host my entire site on Google Base, Google Pages and del.icio.us. Unfortunately, because it was something I had just knocked up there was no comment support, and of course it did require Java and JavaScript to be enabled in the browser.

Thus I’ve given up on it for now and moved over to WordPress. Who knows, maybe I’ll give up on this when I realise I have no idea how to customise it to my liking, or when something even more whizzy and fun comes along, but for now, this is it. If you would like to take a look at my older site, you can find it at mcknut.googlepages.com.