Re: [coldsync-hackers] Newbie question: p5-palm and Yahoo Address Book

[Per Reedtz Thomsen <pthomsen@reedtz.com>]

Andrew Arensburger wrote:

> On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, Per Reedtz Thomsen wrote
> 
>> So far it seems that the file from Yahoo is fraught with problems. There
>> are are no readable 'creator' and 'type' fields in the file (I edited
>> the file to contain 'addr' and 'DATA'), and the attributes (from PDB.pm)
>> field seems to indicate that the file is a resource and not a database.
> 
> 	Hm. Sounds as if it's not a Palm database. Does 'pdbdump
> Yahoo_ab-n.aba' give any meaningful results?

Here's what pdbdump returns... This is on the file that I edited
to contain the creator and type information. (Hence the '-n' in the
file name)...
------------------------------------------------------------------
newton:~/ysync/Address [94] pdbdump Yahoo_ab-n.aba
File size: 29881
Database header:
    00 01 42 41 09 59 61 68 6f 6f 2e 61 62 61 32 43 |..BA.Yahoo.aba2C|
    75 73 74 6f 6d 20 31 0a 43 75 73 74 6f 6d 20 32 |ustom 1.Custom 2|
    0a 43 75 73 74 6f 6d 20 33 0a 43 75 73 74 6f 6d |.Custom 3.Custom|
    20 34 0a 30 31 32 33 34 0a 31 0a 0a 44 41 54 41 | 4.01234.1..DATA|
    61 64 64 72 00 06 00 00                         |addr....        |

    Name:           BA  Yahoo.aba2Custom 1
Custom 2
    Attributes:     0xa43
    Version:        30067
    Ctime:          1953459488  Thu Nov 25 03:38:08 1965
    Mtime:          856310645   Wed Feb 18 16:04:05 1931
    Backup time:    1937010541  Tue May 18 19:29:01 1965
    Mod number:     540281392
    AppInfo offset: 825373492
    Sort offset:    170985994
    Type:           DATA
    Creator:        addr
    Unique ID seed: 393216

No handler defined for creator "addr", type "DATA"
------------------------------------------------------

The reason I'm getting the 'No handler' message, I believe, is that the 
attributes are indicating that this is a resource file, and not a 
database

>> After short circuiting PDB.pm (assigning the
>> $self->{attributes}{resource} to 0), the file can be read, but there are
>> complaints about the offset of the records:
>> 
>> Record 28 has same offset as previous one: 16778496
>> Record 30 has same offset as previous one: 83887360
>> Record 31 has same offset as previous one: 83887360
>> Record 37 has same offset as previous one: 0
> 
> 	These messages are complaints about zero-length records. I'm
> not sure yet whether these are a Bad Thing in the general case.
> 	Here, though, it appears that they are definitely not good. In
> particular, these offsets are far too high to be reasonable (I can't
> imagine that you'd have an 83Mb address book), and the fact that the
> last "same offset" is lower than the previous one is particularly
> suspicious. Again, are you sure this is a Palm database file?
> 

Well, Yahoo claims that it is... However, it looks like there are a lot 
of problems with it... As for the size of the file, it's just under 30Kb.

I might follow the advice I got from Erik, and use the CSV file export 
from Yahoo instead... I'd like to use this file, though...

I will be doing some more investigation into the content of the data 
itself. If that is useless, too, I will probably use the CSV file.

Thanks for your help,
Per


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