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Creating Accelerators for Other People's Web Services

Before we shipped IE8 there were no Accelerators, so we had some fun making our own for our favorite web services. I've got a small set of tips for creating Accelerators for other people's web services. I was planning on writing this up as an IE blog post, but Jon wrote a post covering a similar area so rather than write a full and coherent blog post I'll just list a few points:

• The first thing to try is looking for developer help for the web service, specifically if there's a REST-ful URL based API. For example, Bing Maps has great URL API documentation that would be enough to create an Accelerator.
• The Accelerator XML is very similar to HTML forms. If you can find an HTML form for the web service for which you want to create an Accelerator, you can view the HTML source and create an Accelerator based on that.
• I created the FormToAccelerator extension based on the previous idea. You can use the extension to create an Accelerator from an HTML form, or just use it to create the start of one and edit it manually after.
• If the page doesn't use an HTML form, you can start up an HTTP debugger like Fiddler, use the web service from the normal web page, and then in Fiddler see if you can find a REST-ful looking URL you can use.
• When looking to create a preview for your Accelerator, see if the web page for the web service has a mobile version or a version that's intended to embed in other web pages via an iframe. On this same line, iPhone apps make great Accelerators usually with lovely previews.
• If there's no mobile or embeddable version and the only thing wrong with the normal web page for the web service is that the useful information doesn't fit in the preview window then see if you can find an HTML tag with a name or id near the useful information, and stick a '#' fragment pointing to that tag onto the preview URL template.
• Without a reasonable REST-ful API you can use a combination of Google's "site:" and "I'm Feeling Lucky" to find the most relevant page on a particular site.
• The value of a name and value pair need not consist of only a single Accelerator variable. You can get creative and put other text in there. For instance, I implemented a Google currency conversion by setting the query to "{selection} in US Dollars".

PowerShell Scanning Script

I've hooked up the printer/scanner to the Media Center PC since I leave that on all the time anyway so we can have a networked printer. I wanted to hook up the scanner in a somewhat similar fashion but I didn't want to install HP's software (other than the drivers of course). So I've written my own script for scanning in PowerShell that does the following:

1. Scans using the Windows Image Acquisition APIs via COM
2. Runs OCR on the image using Microsoft Office Document Imaging via COM (which may already be on your PC if you have Office installed)
3. Converts the image to JPEG using .NET Image APIs
4. Stores the OCR text into the EXIF comment field using .NET Image APIs (which means Windows Search can index the image by the text in the image)
5. Moves the image to the public share

Here's the actual code from my scan.ps1 file:

param([Switch] $ShowProgress, [switch] $OpenCompletedResult)

$filePathTemplate = "C:\users\public\pictures\scanned\scan {0} {1}.{2}";
$time = get-date -uformat "%Y-%m-%d";

[void]([reflection.assembly]::loadfile( "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.Drawing.dll"))

$deviceManager = new-object -ComObject WIA.DeviceManager
$device = $deviceManager.DeviceInfos.Item(1).Connect();

foreach ($item in $device.Items) {
        $fileIdx = 0;
        while (test-path ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,"*")) {
                [void](++$fileIdx);
        }

        if ($ShowProgress) { "Scanning..." }

        $image = $item.Transfer();
        $fileName = ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,$image.FileExtension);
        $image.SaveFile($fileName);
        clear-variable image

        if ($ShowProgress) { "Running OCR..." }

        $modiDocument = new-object -comobject modi.document;
        $modiDocument.Create($fileName);
        $modiDocument.OCR();
        if ($modiDocument.Images.Count -gt 0) {
                $ocrText = $modiDocument.Images.Item(0).Layout.Text.ToString().Trim();
                $modiDocument.Close();
                clear-variable modiDocument

                if (!($ocrText.Equals(""))) {
                        $fileAsImage = New-Object -TypeName system.drawing.bitmap -ArgumentList $fileName
                        if (!($fileName.EndsWith(".jpg") -or $fileName.EndsWith(".jpeg"))) {
                                if ($ShowProgress) { "Converting to JPEG..." }

                                $newFileName = ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,"jpg");
                                $fileAsImage.Save($newFileName, [System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat]::Jpeg);
                                $fileAsImage.Dispose();
                                del $fileName;

                                $fileAsImage = New-Object -TypeName system.drawing.bitmap -ArgumentList $newFileName 
                                $fileName = $newFileName
                        }

                        if ($ShowProgress) { "Saving OCR Text..." }

                        $property = $fileAsImage.PropertyItems[0];
                        $property.Id = 40092;
                        $property.Type = 1;
                        $property.Value = [system.text.encoding]::Unicode.GetBytes($ocrText);
                        $property.Len = $property.Value.Count;
                        $fileAsImage.SetPropertyItem($property);
                        $fileAsImage.Save(($fileName + ".new"));
                        $fileAsImage.Dispose();
                        del $fileName;
                        ren ($fileName + ".new") $fileName
                }
        }
        else {
                $modiDocument.Close();
                clear-variable modiDocument
        }

        if ($ShowProgress) { "Done." }

        if ($OpenCompletedResult) {
                . $fileName;
        }
        else {
                $result = dir $fileName;
                $result | add-member -membertype noteproperty -name OCRText -value $ocrText
                $result
        }
}

I ran into a few issues:

• MODI doesn't seem to be in the Office 2010 Technical Preview I installed first. Installing Office 2007 fixed that.
• The MODI.Document class, at least via PowerShell, can't be instantiated in a 64bit environment. To run the script on my 64bit OS I had to start powershell from the 32bit cmd.exe (C:\windows\syswow64\cmd.exe).
• I was planning to hook up my script to the scanner's 'Scan' button, but HP didn't get the button working for their Vista driver. Their workaround is "don't do that!".
• You must call Image.Dispose() to get .NET to release its reference to the corresponding image file.
• In trying to figure out how to store the text in the files comment, I ran into a dead-end trying to find the corresponding setter for GetDetailsOf which folks like James O'Neil use in PowerShell for interesting ends.

A Brief History of Microsoft's Live Search's New Domain Bing

• 2003 July: The first archived version of bing.com features "bing! is a small device (e.g., possibly even a small Band-Aid(R)-like sticker!) that vibrates when a person's cell phone rings." I can't recall 2003 cell phones, were they big enough to require this device?
• 2004 August: Site for the same device is rewritten and looks much better, IMHO.
• 2006 June: The domain is now parked by easyDNS. I guess the "bing!" device didn't work out?
• 2006 November: Its now "BING*" and they won't say what they're working on ("we're still in stealth mode") but they are hiring C#/.NET developers.
• 2007 January: And they're gone. Without even exiting stealth mode. Too bad, I liked their logo. Their domain is now for sale...
• 2007 February: Looks like EasyMail buys the domain and offers a physical mailing service in Australia: "By simply clicking a button on your computer, mail is beamed electronically to a bing post office. Your mail is automatically printed, folded, enveloped and dispatched into the Australia Post network the very same day."
• Present: Now its the new home for Live Search of course.

The new name reminds me of the show Friends. Also, I hope they get a new favicon - I don't enjoy the stretched 'b' nor its color scheme.

Flickr Visual Search in IE8

A while ago I promised to say how an xsltproc Meddler script would be useful and the general answer is its useful for hooking up a client application that wants data from the web in a particular XML format and the data is available on the web but in another XML format. The specific case for this post is a Flickr Search service that includes IE8 Visual Search Suggestions. IE8 wants the Visual Search Suggestions XML format and Flickr gives out search data in their Flickr web API XML format.

So I wrote an XSLT to convert from Flickr Search XML to Visual Suggestions XML and used my xsltproc Meddler script to actually apply this xslt.

After getting this all working I've placed the result in two places: (1) I've updated the xsltproc Meddler script to include this XSLT and an XML file to install it as a search provider - although you'll need to edit the XML to include your own Flickr API key. (2) I've created a service for this so you can just install the Flickr search provider if you're interested in having the functionality and don't care about the implementation. Additionally, to the search provider I've added accelerator preview support to show the Flickr slideshow which I think looks snazzy.

Doing a quick search for this it looks like there's at least one other such implementation, but mine has the distinction of being done through XSLT which I provide, updated XML namespaces to work with the released version of IE8, and I made it so you know its good.

Platonic Ideals in Anathem and The Atrocity Archives

On the topic of made up words: I get made up words for made up things, but there's already a name for cell-phone in English: its "cell-phone". The narrator notes that the book has been translated into English so I guess I'll blame the fictional translator. Anyway, I wasn't bothered by the made up words nearly as much as some folk. Its a good thing I'm long out of college because I can easily imagine confusing the names of actual concepts and people with those from the book, like Hemn space for Hamming distance. Towards the beginning, the description of slines and the post-post-apocalyptic setting reminded me briefly of Idiocracy.

Recently, I've been reading everything of Charles Stross that I can, including about a month ago, The Jennifer Morgue from the surprisingly awesome amalgamation genre of spy thriller and Lovecraft horror. Its the second in a series set in a universe in which magic exists as a form of mathematics and follows Bob Howard programmer/hacker, cube dweller, and begrudging spy who works for a government agency tasked to suppress this knowledge and protect the world from its use. For a taste, try a short story from the series that's freely available on Tor's website, Down on the Farm.

Coincidentally, both Anathem and the Bob Howard series take an interest in the world of Platonic ideals. In the case of Anathem (without spoiling anything) the universe of Platonic ideals, under a different name of course, is debated by the characters to be either just a concept or an actual separate universe and later becomes the underpinning of major events in the book. In the Bob Howard series, magic is applied mathematics that through particular proofs or computations awakens/disturbs/provokes unnamed horrors in the universe of Platonic ideals to produce some desired effect in Bob's universe.

Thoughts on registerProtocolHandler in HTML 5

I'm a big fan of the concept of registerProtocolHandler in HTML 5 and in FireFox 3, but not quite the implementation. From a high level, it allows web apps to register themselves as handlers of an URL scheme so for (the canonical) example, GMail can register for the mailto URL scheme. I like the concept:

• Better integration of web apps with your system.
• Its easy for web apps to do.
• Links to URNs can now take the user to the sites the user prefers for the sort of thing identified by the URN. For example, if I have a physical address in HTML, instead of making that an http link to Yahoo Maps, I can make the link a geo scheme URI and those who follow the link will get their preferred mapping site that has registered for that scheme. Actually, looking at the geo scheme's RFC, maybe I'd rather use some other URN scheme to represent the physical location, but you get the point.

• There's no way to know if you are the handler for a particular URL scheme which is an important question for web app URL protocol handler authors.
• There's no way to fallback to an http URL in the case that a particular URL scheme isn't registered. A suggested solution to testing the registration of a scheme is for browsers to provide an additional script method to check if a scheme is registered. I don't like the idea of writing script that walks over all my page's links and rewrites them based on that method. I'd much rather see a declarative and backwards compatible fallback mechanism, although I don't know what that would look like.
• There's no way to register for a namespace within the urn scheme URI, the info scheme URI, or the tag scheme URI. I want to register info:lccn/... (Library of Congress Card Number identifiers) to LibraryThing or Amazon and I want to register urn:duri:... (dated URIs) to the Web Archive, among other things.


• Will this result in a proliferation of unregistered URL schemes with clashing namespaces? The ESW Wiki notes why this would be bad.
• And last, although this is nitpickier than the rest, I don't like the '%s' syntax used in the registration method. I'd much rather pass in an URL template, like the URL template used in OpenSearch. If an URL template is used for matching rather than registering against a particular URL scheme, this could also allow for registering a namespace within a URN. For example something along the lines of: registerProtocolHandler("info:lccn/{lccnID}", "htttp://www.librarything.com/search_works.php?q={lccnID}", "LibraryThing LCCN")

Internet Explorer 8 Released

IE8, the software I've been working on for some time now, has finally been released at MIX09.

• Download IE8.
• Dean's MIX09 Keynote releasing IE8 is viewable here.
• Louis pointed me to this humorous IE8 advertising that doesn't make me cringe. On the contrary it has Ask a Ninja, Janeane Garofalo, and several comedians I recall collectively from either 'I Love the [decade]' or 'Best Week Ever'.
• It seems like only a year ago that IE8 Beta was released.
• IE Blog: IE8 Released.

Subst Allows Non-Letter Drive Letters

I knew that the command line tool subst would create virtual drives that map to existing directories but I didn't know that subst lets you name the virtual drives with characters that aren't US-ASCII letters. For instance you can run 'subst 4: C:\windows' and then 'more 4:\win.ini' to dump C:\windows\win.ini. This also works for non-US-ASCII characters like, "Ｃ" (aka U+FF23, Fullwidth Latin Capital Letter C), which when displayed by cmd.exe via some best fit style character conversions looks just like the regular US-ASCII 'C'. None of Explorer, IE, or the common file dialogs allow the use of these odd virtual drives -- just cmd.exe, so I'm not sure how this would ever be useful but I thought it was odd and I wanted to share.