information – The Sarth Repository

Participated in the Information Services and Design symposium last week. Gave a short talk on intellectual property rights in context of economic development and the knowledge economy, as well as submitted a small paper that is now part of the UCB iSchool Report Series, 2007-011 (PDF).

In truth, I’m not terribly confident about the paper. The domain was too large to be effectively covered in either a 5000-word paper or a 15-minute talk. There are significant implications in IPR in development that falls more into international political economy. The problem is very multifaceted, and there are a number of IPE perspectives that can be used as a lens on this. I think my conclusions here derive from a realist position that national interest has trumped any pretenses to free market liberal economics in this case, but that would be a fairly gross simplification of the factors at work.

Eh, but it’s a tangible output that’s seen more publicity than anything else I’ve done lately.

If you’ve left information in the Address Book in OS X, any other program on the machine can use Cocoa APIs to extract information automatically.

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
#import <AddressBook/AddressBook.h>
#import <AppKit/NSWorkspace.h>

void sayHello(void)
{
   ABPerson *currUser = [[ABAddressBook sharedAddressBook] me];
   NSString *firstName = [currUser valueForProperty:kABFirstNameProperty];
   NSString *lastName = [currUser valueForProperty:kABLastNameProperty];
   [[NSWorkspace sharedWorkspace] 
                           openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:
                                                     [NSString stringWithFormat:
                                                     @"http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%@+%@", 
                                                          firstName,
                                                          lastName]]];
}

int main (int argc, const char * argv[])
{
   NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
   sayHello();
   [pool release];
   return 0;
}

This will take the name labelled as the currently logged in user and hit up Google, placing the first and last name in the search box and run a search with it. Other pieces of information are also accessible via the AddressBook API.

As you can well see, this can be used for many purposes: nifty automagical hacks in the OS’s built-in suite of personal information and communcation apps, for example. But I can think of less beneficial uses for this API. You should be able to trust the programs you run.

Tag: information

Information Services and Design symposium, brief retrospect

Extracting Address Book information