Here's a screenshot of today's milestone on Mendeley for Android; collection display running in the emulator: Mendeley for Android: screenshot of collection display was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on January 11, 2011.

As my hobby-geek phase draws to a close and I return well and truly to my PhD, I thought it worth sharing this python script I wrote a while back which will extract the update.zip file from an Android RUU.exe file on Linux. There are other items out there that do the same thing, but this is my effort. Usage: modify the options, start the script and then run the RUU under Wine.

Originally from V-Nessa's site, I thought I would share the PHP script that I have now modified to include Secure Copy (SCP) support. {% highlight php %} {% endhighlight %} If you need help with usage, it's exactly the same as in V_Nessa's original post, so read there, but now supports copying to a remote host over SSH. Automated CPanel Backups with SCP was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on January 08, 2011.

As I made rapid initial progress on the prototype of the Mendeley Client for Android, I started to think about the design. In order to minimize hits on the API, as well as for speedy browsing, it doesn't make sense for the UI to be initiating API calls at every turn. Instead, it would be better, I decided, to implement this via a synchronization service.

Thanks to Clemens' comment on my last post, I have managed to track down the problems that I was having with OAuth for Mendeley on Android; it's all callback related. It seems that callbacks to any protocol except "http" are prohibited. For instance: A callback request to "http://www.martineve.com" will work. A null callback request ("out of bound"/"OOB") will work and display PIN. A callback request to "martineve-mendroid:///" will fail.

Before anybody non-techie gets excited by the heading there, I'm not claiming this is anywhere near production-ready. In fact, it's not even functional. However, from a technical perspective, my Android Mendeley client has reached a milestone of succesful OAuth login.

Everybody yaks on about backup all the time, but few people actually have a viable setup. They say: "yes, I copy stuff to a USB pen". So, if you do that once a week, how much work would you lose if, just before you undertook the backup, your laptop was stolen? This is exactly what happened to me two months ago except that I had a rigorous backup procedure. I left the British Library and was, one hour later, without my laptop.

In the last day before I head off for a bit of a Christmas break, I decided to take up a recent proposition to start work on an Android client for Mendeley. So far, in a couple of hours, I've got as far as implementing the OAuth provider, so you can start the application, log in to Mendeley and it will ask you to authorize the application to access your Mendeley account. Well, that's the theory... there's a problem, though.

I typically have (well, had) about 200 emails in my Inbox, which was just as a result of trying to keep on top of things that I needed to do at some point in the future. Predictably, the box kept growing. No matter how fast I swept away the other 200 or so emails that came in over a week, the original stash never went down. I also missed quite a few things due to not having a system. Today, however, my Inbox looks somewhat different.

In recent days, given the furore over Amazon's decision to no longer host Wikileaks, it has become common parlance to declare that the web is now subjected to the pressures that government can bring to bear on corporate entities (web hosting). See posts by both Richard Hall and John Naughton.

This is a quick, personal post to express my disgust at the government's recent proposals to "reform" the Disabled Living Allowance and scrap the Independent Living Fund. While I have been extremely unhappy about the cuts, particularly to higher education, this latest batch hits a group of people who really need this support. And what does it save? The ILF costs a relatively small £359m.