Mark J Cox blog/20040116065249.html

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16 Jan 2004: PIM

Vcard implementing application suck. Over the holidays I decided to unify my contacts, I had different people in different places. When a flight got delayed for 24 hours in New York I was lucky that I had a friend in New York in the right contact database. Anyway I decided to standardise on vcf (vcard) format. One long big text file with entries for all my contacts. Sounds good so far, right? Well it turns out everyone deals with vcf files in a different way. Palm Desktop (win) will import such a file but trashes fields it doesn't understand (which means its a one-way import). Updating entries, even keeping the same serial number, causes it to create a duplicate entry. My T610 phone will happily email me a vcf file and cunningly even embed the photo associated with the contact. But it isn't so happy having vcf's pushed back to it (you have the same duplication issues and it ignores the pictures). Outlook will only import one VCF entry at a time and seems to trash fields it doesn't understand. I can make Outlook express crash badly given a certain VCARD 3.0 format vcf file.

Time to go play with kdepim (although the version I had installed on Red Hat Linux 9 didn't cope with version 3 stuff) and we just issued a kdepim erratum yesterday due to vcard processing vulnerabilieis. Hmmmm.. perhaps it's safer and quicker to just print out my contacts and stick the pages in my Franklin Covey planner.

Created: 16 Jan 2004
Tagged as: ha, red hat

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Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my thoughts and opinions on my security work, open source, fedora, home automation, and other topics.

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