Well I haven’t said much on here in a while because I’ve been busy with various projects. One of which has involved me writing my first application for Blackberry’s.

This has been an interesting experience so far and has taken quite a bit of time to get used to. Writing an application in Java having not touched it for about 5 years has been good and getting used to new API’s is always interesting.

I’m sure there will be many more blog posts to come now on little bits and pieces to do with Blackberry development, especially with the lacking support with regards to its UI. The standard widgets it provides are generally qutie poor and require a lot of customising to get an app even looking half decent. It is here that I envy iPhone devels as from what I can tell there is a very good standard library of widgets (standardised in appearance as well) available to them.

I will be posting code snippets shortly that try to overcome any little problems I have found along the way and hopefully these will be useful to some of you out there. Time will tell…

I found an interesting article about integrating twitter with your web site. From the article:

“Web developers with social media savvy are in hot demand. Imagine what it would be like to promise your clients a web presence that is fully integrated with their Twitter strategy and makes it easier for their content to go viral on Twitter. Would be nice, no? Well — why imagine? The tools for web developers to add a touch of Twitter to any site are out there and easy to use. Trust us — your clients will love you for it!”

The site lists 10 useful ways to take advantage of twitter on your own sites. I have already started using twitter feed to send these blog posts to twitter but there are many alternative ways it can be utilised.

This list is a good compilation of tools that can be used to great effect along with twitter.

I have just configured a Cisco 2600XM with a WIC1 ADSL card to connect to a UK ADSL provider (Virgin). This config should be pretty standard and I have used a similar one a few times before so I am posting it as a reference others and myself in the future. I am leaving out the specifics of the internal network such as the FastEthernet config and DHCP as these are separate issues really. This is just a focus on the ADSL side of things.

The first interface you need to configure is the ATM interface as shown in the code below.

interface ATM0/0
no ip address
no ip mroute-cache
no atm ilmi-keepalive
pvc 0/38
encapsulation aal5mux ppp dialer
dialer pool-member 1
!
dsl operating-mode auto
hold-queue 224 in

Now you need to configure your Dialer interface to authenticate and communicate with your ISP as follows:

interface Dialer0
ip address negotiated
ip nat outside
encapsulation ppp
dialer pool 1
dialer-group 1
ppp authentication chap callin
ppp chap hostname
ppp chap password 0
Obviously in the above example and need to be replaced with your actual username and password from your ISP.

This should allow your ADSL card to create a connection with your ISP and now you just need to configure your internal networks, easy peasy…

Compsing Bibtex entries for use in Latex can be a pain at the best of times. Deciding which entry type to use, entering all the authors, page numbers, journal/conference name etc etc.

I was messing about in nautilus the other day and accidentally double clicked on one of my bibtex files. To my surprise a nice GUI application called KBibteX opened with my bibtex entries from the file all organised.

After a little more playing around with it I found that it is extremely useful for adding new entries. A nice GUI lets you enter all the information into text fields and view the output source at all times. Then when an entry has been entered you can click on it in the overview and it will show you how Latex will display the output.

I would definitely recommend KBibteX to anyone that has to work with Bibtex on a regular basis it is a real nice time saver.

Of course a lot of the time it is possible to find entries for papers etc already composed from well known sources such as citeseer. For computing references I would highly recommend The Collection Of Computer Science Bibliographies. The site is not always the most reliable but the number of bibtex entries it contains is phenomenal and regularly updated with the latest papers.