CalMap: a Calendar/Maps mashup

Not too long ago, I imported MLB schedule data into WikiCalendars.com. This made it simple to see when the Mets were playing next, but not where they would be playing next, so I decided to create CalMap: a mashup that takes a calendar feed and plots the locations of the events on a map:



Currently, CalMap only plots the locations it knows, which are listed in a JSON data file. I also use this to assign marker colors so baseball teams in the same division will have the same color -- this makes the interleague games easy to pick out on the map!

If you inspect the default URL for CalMap, you will see that the URL to the calendar feed that you want to load is simply passed as a GET parameter:

http://calmap.bolinfest.com/?url=http://www.wikicalendars.com/wiki/MLB_2007_nym_protected

For WikiCalendars, you can also splice a number of calendars together and plot them as one calendar. For example, you can combine the calendars for all of the NL East teams and display them as one on CalMap:

http://calmap.bolinfest.com/?url=http://www.wikicalendars.com/splice.php?cal=MLB_2007_nym_protected,MLB_2007_phi_protected,MLB_2007_atl_protected,MLB_2007_fla_protected,MLB_2007_was_protected

The supplied calendar feed needs to follow the GData JSON conventions, so it needs to honor alt=json-in-script, start-min, start-max, etc. This means that, yes, CalMap may execute arbitrary JavaScript from foreign sites, which is why I put it on its own subdomain of bolinfest.com where there are no cookies to steal.

Also, so that my demo does not get trashed, I created copies of the original MLB calendars and made versions of them that only I can edit so that the CalMap home page does not become spammy. I have written a Chickenfoot script to update these new versions of the calendars with data from mlb.com, so if you added one of the old MLB calendars to your Google Calendar account, I recommend replacing it with one from the list of protected calendars as the new calendars will be updated fairly frequently with legitimate data. (You can also subscribe to one of my "protected" MLB calendars by following the Subscribe link at the bottom of CalMap.)

The only thing left to do is to figure out how to run Chickenfoot reliably as a cronjob...

I want my Win XP!

About a month ago, I spent an hour on the phone screaming (yes, literally screaming) at Dell because they had sold me a machine with Windows Vista. Admittedly, I knew that it would have Vista because when I ordered it online, I was not given the option to select XP. Fortunately for me, Dell recently reversed its decision to impose Vista on the world, so as soon as I saw the post on Slashdot, I got on the phone with Dell and demanded XP again. (After the previous conversation with them, I was planning to return the machine altogether.) This time, they acceded.

You may be wondering why I wanted Windows so badly, and in particular, why Windows XP? A couple of years ago, I bought a Dell touchscreen (model E153FPT) in hopes of building my own little kiosk. It would have been ideal to hook it up to my Mac Mini, but I could only find drivers for Windows. Also, there are still a few things that I use that only work on Windows, such as X10 ActiveHome and the Google Talk client, both of which I would like to use on my kiosk.

When I ordered the machine, I thought it might be fun to try out Vista, but instead it was a nightmare. The new UI paradigm where they hide the menubar by default drove me nuts (as I expected it would), and the popup situation is just as bad as the I'm a Mac "Security" claims it is. But the real deal breaker was when I discovered that there were no drivers for the E153FPT – I got on the phone and was furious that Dell would force me to buy a new machine with an operating system that was incompatible with other hardware I bought from Dell. The first time I called, the best they would do was sell me XP for $120 instead of the retail price of $200. I found this pretty outrageous as the machine I bought cost less than $500 in the first place.

I'm happy that the problem is resolved, but after the second phone call, I had spent a total of two hours on the phone and had talked to at least seven people, all because I wasn't offered the option to select XP with my new machine on their web site in the first place.

Saved by xmpp4moz!

After my recent post requesting information about a Firefox-friendly Jabber library, it dawned on me that I should try searching for firefox xmpp library instead of firefox jabber library. Lo and behold, I discovered xmpp4moz! From the project web site, I downloaded the SamePlace Suite Firefox extension, which is a small suite of applications built on top of xmpp4moz. I fired it up and discovered that it contained a nice Jabber client written in XUL with explicit support for Google Talk. The only remaining question was: how did it work?

I checked out the xmpp4moz code from the repository and started looking through it to figure out how it made a secure connection to talk.google.com. I immediately found some code that mentioned the starttls exchange that had thwarted my previous efforts to build a Jabber library for Firefox, but unfortunately it was commented out! After shooting in the dark for awhile with grep, I decided to find the entry point to the sign-on code and step through it.

Two important differences from the Smack library were (1) xmpp4moz connected on port 5223 instead of port 5222, and (2) the initial stanza that it sent to the server included my username and password:

<iq to={JID(jid).hostname} type="set">
  <query xmlns="jabber:iq:auth">
    <username>{JID(jid).username}</username>
    <password>{password}</password>
    <resource>{JID(jid).resource}</resource>
  </query>
</iq>

I found this odd, as this was not what was described in the jabberd 2.0 protocol document I had discovered earlier. I searched on Google to find out what the difference between using ports 5222 and 5223 was, and found out that port 5222 offers TLS support while port 5223 offers SSL support. So by using port 5223, I could connect to Google Talk by using an SSL transport in Firefox, created as follows:

const srvSocketTransport = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/network/socket-transport-service;1"]
    .getService(Components.interfaces.nsISocketTransportService);
var transport = srvSocketTransport.createTransport(['ssl'], 1, "talk.google.com", 5223, null);

From what I have seen of the code so far, xmpp4moz looks to be an organized, well-designed library. I noticed that the developers make generous use of E4X, which is both convenient and brilliant since XMPP messages are in XML: all the more reason to develop a Jabber client within Firefox!

But wait! Didn't I just say that the SamePlace suite already has a nice Jabber client for Firefox? Yes, it certainly does, but I want to explore building an HTML client with some of my own features, so leveraging xmpp4moz looks like the best way to do it!