Christopher Hinze has written a great Firefox addon that exports bookmarks to OPML 1.0. Unfortunately, OPML is a bit of an anything-goes specification. So although Hinze’s plugin produces valid OPML, it isn’t the same sort of valid OPML that Google Reader expects. Google Reader, in fact, gags and chokes on Hinze’s OPML, and refuses to import it.

The main problem is that the <outline/> element, the basic hierarchical building block for OPML, will take any attributes. What does that mean in practice? Well, here’s what Hinze’s export produces:

<outline text=”Coding”>
  <outline type=”link” text=”Joel on Software” url=”http://www.joelonsoftware.com/rss.xml” />
</outline>

and here’s the result of Google Reader exporting its own store of RSS bookmarks:

<outline title=”Coding” text=”Coding”>
  <outline text=”drupal.org - Community plumbing”
    title=”drupal.org - Community plumbing” type=”rss”
    xmlUrl=”http://drupal.org/node/feed” htmlUrl=”http://drupal.org”/>
</outline>

To a computer, these are fundamentally two different data formats: the URLs are stored in different attributes, and there are attributes on each that either have different values or are not present on the other. Someone did a DTD for OPML: looking at those two apparently analogous fragments above you have to ask yourself why they bothered.

Help is at hand, though. This sort of problem is bread and butter to XSLT, and here’s an XSL transform for converting Firefox OPML to Google Reader OPML. If you have xsltproc installed on your system, you would type:

xsltproc http://www.jpstacey.info/applications/google/ff2gr_opml.xsl bookmarks.opml > fixed_bookmarks.opml

Or download the XSLT—it’s released under GPL2—and run it locally, changing that URL there to a local file location.

One thing to note: the XSLT will remove an outline wrapped around your bookmarks with title “Sage Feeds” (case-sensitive). So you can export that branch of your bookmarks, and the XSLT will strip the wrapper off and you won’t import a load of bookmarks tagged “Sage Feeds”. If you don’t like this behaviour then either rename your Sage bookmark container, or learn XSLT: it won’t kill you.

Alsa seems stable and graphics support is present from installation onwards. Enabling fancier 3D compiz effects requires the nvidia-glx-new package; compiz spots this, however and prompts for installation. All very smooth. Wireless works; my VoIP headset works; but I haven’t yet tested Bluetooth.

The only problem was in upgrading from Gutsy: my previous peregrinations had rendered my hybrid distribution shafted and incapable of upgrade. This isn’t a problem, though, if one has installed the /home directory (and in my case the /music one too) on a separate partition: the Ubuntu Live CD will blat the root partition with Heron, but leave the other partitions alone if you so require. Don’t resize any of your partitions during installation, though, or you’ll lose everything. Everything!

Your mashup is probably legal.
Your mashup is probably sound.
Your mashup is probably legal,
So pass all that data around!

Stuff here
Stuff there
And something mashed up in between (be-tween!)
Stuff here
Stuff there
And something mashed up in between

Your mashup is probably legal;
You could monetize it as well!
But though I contend it’s all legal,
Remember I-A-N-A-L!

[Repeat chorus]

The session I compèred went reasonably well: I can’t say my elegant prose exactly sparkled, and I occasionally found myself getting into the subjects being discussed so much that I forgot to flash the “X minutes left” warning signs. With that in mind, thanks are due to speakers Ben, Steven, Roo and Nick for both their talks and their patience. Hopefully there’ll be some area for speakers to upload their slides etc. soon, so I can link their names through to it when that happens.

It’s called Straight Edge, and I’ve switched to it today. Once I’ve finished alpha-testing it I’ll write more about it, and offer it for download if anyone’s interested.

Of course, much earlier than today, and he’d have had to have written it before giving the talk that it was based on, which might sound a bit demanding on my part. But hey! I don’t make the rules.

[Edit: run Python using Javascript too.]

Last.fm’s web interface isn’t optimized for the sort of “media station” use we put it to, and their downloadable widget won’t work on the antiquated version of OSX that I’ve just about managed to squeeze onto dear old Purpurea. So today I’ve spent some time writing a bookmarklet to allow me (and you, dear reader) to hook into Last.fm and its Flash player’s behaviour, to update a larger-view popup window with the necessary information.

Here’s the bookmarklet—which with attention to catchy names I’ve called LastJS—with spaces added for legibility:

javascript:void(function(){
  var s1=document.createElement(’script’);
  var s2=document.createElement(’script’);
  s1.src=’http://www.jpstacey.info/applications/lastjs/jquery.js’;
  s2.src=’http://www.jpstacey.info/applications/lastjs/last.js’;

  var h=document.getElementsByTagName(’head’)[0];
  h.appendChild(s1);
  h.appendChild(s2);
}())

(As the above suggests, the bulk of the code is at http://www.jpstacey.info/applications/lastjs/last.js.)

And here’s what you need to do to use it:

1. Add this link to your browser favourites (IE7) or bookmarks (everyone else): LastJS bookmarklet.
2. While on a Last.FM “now playing” page e.g. for The Hold Steady, click the bookmarklet.
3. This will pull an instance of jQuery and LastJS off my own server, and add a “click for big” link under the title.
4. Click on the link. A new window will open, containing the artist information (track information is a bit obfuscated until the Flash player loads the next track).
5. Wait. As the track changes, the new window will update with the new track information.
6. The text is purposefully large yet not too large. If you’ve got a big monitor you can make it even bigger by increasing the base font size in your browser. To do this in Firefox press CTRL-+ (or Apple-+); I think it’s something similar in IE7.

Feel free to poke around at the code, and distribute it (under GPL, for what it’s worth: I tried looking into precisely which variant I wanted but my knees started to ache). Here are some of the problems it has to solve:

1. Last.fm uses Prototype, and so needs jQuery to restore the $ variable using jQuery.noConflict().
2. Events in the Flash player trigger functions in the window scope: by putting a new method in for a given event handler you can hook into Flash events. Care has to be taken, though, not to wrap and re-wrap too often—the bookmarklet might after all be re-clicked—or you might provoke a recursion warning.
3. Popup blockers mean that you can’t always guarantee the window will exist, and the code has to check accordingly.
4. Firefox seems to blank the contents of the popup window shortly after it’s opened, so any writing of text to it has to be delayed, lest it be lost by this clear-out.

All probably needs work, but feel free to have a play. It doesn’t circumvent any DRM or anything, of course, but I’ve no idea whether it invalidates terms of use, so caveat fructor.