Zen and the art of iCal sync

It appears that the creative zen vision supports the ics format for storing events and tasks, which is version 2.0 of the vCalendar format. This is good news, since I can now sync my google and iCal calendars to the player, without the need to boot into Windows. All that is needed is

1. Export the ics file from the application (iCal, Mozilla or Google Calendar)
2. Send the ics to the zen using mtp-sendfile
   $mtp-sendfile ~/Home.ics Home.ics (The second argument is destination filename)

Thats it. Events and tasks would appear in Zen. I even wrote an appleScript to automate this, which i would soon be posting here.

Creative Zen Vision on Mac (Darwin)

Unfortunately for us, inspite of Zen Vision M being a great device, it doesn't appears as a USB Mass Storage Device. If it would have, we could have simply accessed it as a USB hard-disk in just about any OS without any pain. But then, Creative choose to use MTP instead, maybe because of their special relationship with Microsoft (and then got stabbed in the back when MS released Zune).

Here is some interesting news on MTP from wikipedia, though

Media Transfer Protocol is a set of custom extensions to the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) devised by Microsoft, to allow the protocol to be used for devices other than digital cameras, for example digital audio players such as MP3 players, and other portable media devices, for example portable video players.

The USB Implementers Forum device working group is presently working on standardizing MTP as a fully fledged Universal Serial Bus (USB) device class. When that process is complete, MTP will be a USB device class peer to USB mass storage device class, USB Video Class, and so on.

Since that standardisation would take some time, and I suddenly had some free time on hand on fine sunday morning, I decided to try and see what we can still get to work on darwin.

To begin with, I downloaded the libmtp library from sourceforge, which fortunately enough supports mac already and didn't needed any porting, except for an iconv issue. The problem with libiconv is (which is , btw, a library for converting from one charecter set encoding to the other) that there are simply too many versions floating around. So while libmtp compiles and installs fine, any of the example programs won't run, failing with missing symbols.

That was easily fixed though, by adding -liconv to the Makefile in the examples directory in the libmtp sources. (Search for LIBS = -lusb and append -liconv). With this change, running mtp-detect (which installs in /usr/local/bin) gives this output

Autodetected device "Creative Zen Vision:M" (VID=041e,PID=413e) is known.
Connected to MTP device.
USB low-level info:
   bcdUSB: 512
   bDeviceClass: 255
   bDeviceSubClass: 0
   bDeviceProtocol: 0
   idVendor: 041e
   idProduct: 413e
   IN endpoint maxpacket: 512 bytes
   OUT endpoint maxpacket: 512 bytes
   Device flags: 0x00000000
Device info:
   Manufacturer: Creative Technology Ltd
   Model: Creative Zen Vision:M
   Device version: 1.30.02_0.00.16
   Serial number: 00023C02FB1FE532E960B05763D234C3
   Vendor extension ID: 0x00000006
   Vendor extension description: microsoft.com: 1.0;microsoft.com/WMPPD: 10.0;mi
crosoft.com/WMDRMPD: 10.1;
Supported operations:
   1001: get device info
   1002: Open session
   1003: Close session
...
...

Quite a lot of it actually, but here is the more relevant part

  3009: MP3
      de99: AudioWAVECodec
      de9a: AudioBitRate
      dc46: Artist
      dc89: Duration
      dc8b: Track
      dc8c: Genre
      dc99: OriginalReleaseDate
      dc9a: AlbumName
      de93: SampleRate
      de94: NumberOfChannels
      de95: AudioBitDepth
      dc91: UseCount
      dc8a: Rating
      d901: BuyFlag
      dc01: StorageID
      dc0b: ParentObject
      dc02: ObjectFormat
      dc04: ObjectSize
      dc07: ObjectFileName
      dc41: PersistantUniqueObjectIdentifier
      dc4f: NonConsumable
      dc44: Name
   b901: WMA
...
   3008: MS Wave
   ba05: Abstract Audio Video Playlist
   ba01: Abstract Multimedia Album
   ba03: Abstract Audio Album
   3801: JPEG
   300a: MS AVI
   300c: ASF
   b982: MP4
   300b: MPEG
   b981: WMV
   bb83: vCard3
   be03: vCalendar2
   3000: Undefined Type
   3001: Association/Directory
   b802: Firmware

Quite a few formats there.

Unix 101 - Tip

Here's the first post for the new year.

You have a program that creates a file, writes to it and deletes it later. You want to read that file before its deleted. How do you do that? I have been through such situations in the past, and my crude solution often involved writing a shell script that would keep polling for the existence of the file and then copy it, if it exists. Now here is the Unix way of doing this (I found this in imake faq)

Lets say the name of the transient file is xyz. This is what you do

$ touch fake
$ ln fake xyz

Now run the program that creates xyz. When it tries to remove it, since a hard link exists, it wouldn't be able to do so, and you can access the file afterwards !!

Reminds me of the dead.letter and sendmail exploit. Hard links are fun :))