Plan for Today: write an Aperture datasource for the thunderbird addressbook, this to pass time before lunch while I didn't have my mac, and should be quick and easy.
Fast forward till lunchtime, where I've found that Thunderbird uses the MORK format for it's addressbook. Mork is a "barely machine readable", "stupidest file format I've ever seen", "look-ma-I-wrote-a-DB" excuse for a DB format.
It was designed by some netscape engineer in the 90s who then disappeared and now no-one knows how it works. It looks a bit like this:
<(91=2)(81=Test)(82=Bob)(83=)(84=Test Bob)(87=bobnickname)(85
=bob@tester.com)(88=bobby@serial.co.uk)(80=0)(89=workphone)(8A
=homephone)(8B=faxphone)(8C=papegerphone)(8D=mobphone)(8E
=bobscreenname)(8F=441048b8)(86=1)(90=bill)>
{1:^80 {(k^BF:c)(s=9)}
[1:^82(^BE=2)]
[1(^83^81)(^84^82)(^85=)(^86=)(^87^84)(^88^87)(^89^85)(^8A^85)(^8B^88)
(^8C=)(^8D=)(^8E=0)(^8F=0)(^90^89)(^91^8A)(^92^8B)(^93^8C)(^94^8D)
(^95=)(^96=)(^97=)(^98=)(^99=)(^9A=)(^9B=)(^9C=)(^9D=)(^9E=)(^9F=)…
Luckily someone else has sort of reverse-engineered it, and there exist partial perl parser and one python version.
I've now added to the madness by converting the python one to Java. It sucked and took all day. (And someone pointed out I could have done it with jython, oh well). To make up for it I'm going to share it with the world.
Here download a jar with src/binaries and some examples:
UPDATED! The old version did not handle encoding of non-ascii characters too well – like everything else in mork this was pretty badly done, but now it's working.