As mentioned previously, the two part tutorial on c99.org is a great starting place for people wanting to write their own synchronization service for Android. The only problem is that, because it syncs to Contacts, it omits to tell you what to do to get your new service appearing under Settings -> Accounts -> "Data and Synchronization". The answer is surprisingly simple, but also elusive.
My review of Alan Liu's latest offering, Local Transcendence: Postmodern Historiography and the Database is now available to read in Textual Practice vol. 24 issue 6. I'm in the process of clearing up pre-print Open Access permissions and hope to post that when clarified.
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.
Just a quick promotional post to get the word out about the research hive seminars at Sussex. This series presents an exciting opportunity to hear about, and fore-arm yourself against, the challenges posed to 21st-century research. There are sessions on research communication, public engagement, copyright, careers and the REF. If you are interested in attending, official information is available on the library website.
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.
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.
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.
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.