Ripples in the Ether

Here’s the spot where you can install my Ubiquity QRZ lookup. What is Ubiquity, you might ask? The best way that I can put it is that it’s an extension for Firefox that gives you a “natural language” interface that allows you to do many common tasks very quickly. Here’s an introduction to the technology that you can read, or if you want some pretty pictures view the video below:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

My Ubiquity command gives you a simple way to look up amateur radio callsigns with the QRZ.com server. If you want to give it a try, you have to be using Mozilla Firefox. Go here for a tutorial which gives you the link to install the Ubquity extension and a lesson on how to use it. Once it’s installed come back to this page (or reload it) and you should be presented with a bar at the top of your browser window which asks if you want to install the QRZ command. Confirm that you do, then you’re ready to go!

The usage is very simple. Highlight a callsign on a page, open up your Ubiquity command windows, and type:

qrz

This will pop up a preview of the QRZ.com page for that callsign. If you want to open up a new window with the page, all you have to do at this point is hit Enter. You don’t have to have a callsign highlighted to use this. You can just open up the Ubiquity command line and type in (of course, substitute the actually callsign where it says “callsign” below):

qrz callsign

That’s about as complicated as it gets. This is still a very rough hack that I put together very quickly. It could use some work, especially in parsing the preview so that a lot of the clutter is gone. Still, I think this technology has great potential for powerful applications. Let me know what you think about this command or if you have any suggestions for improvments.