A presentation that I will give on March 27, 2006

Colin's Page - Colin's Home Page:

Des outils utiles sur l’internet - March 27, 2006

A short presentation (in French) to list and introduce some web 2.0 applications that are useful for academics. In this presentation, I Want To, CiteULike & Basecamp are covered. This may be the first presentation in a series, depending on the expressed interest.

US security-related departments fail on cybersecurity

The last line of the article says it all: "Will it take a major computing disaster before the government makes information security more of a priority?"

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LaTeX style: powerdot-black

Powerdot-black is a basic-black style that I wrote for powerdot. It can be used to make simple slides with white text on black slides. To use this style, just drop the file, link below, into your powerdot directory where all the other powerdot style files are.

Download the file

Colin's new place - Colin's New Home Page

I now have a space on Google Pages. I'll use this to post files & stuff in static form.

Colin's new place - Colin's New Home Page

iTunes tip: Finding a gift redemption code

Short story:

Not long ago I sent a music gift through iTunes. When the recipient clicked on the "Redeem Now" button in the email, iTunes prompted for the 12 digit redemption code. Now, just to make the situation interesting, the 12-digit code was not displayed anywhere in the email. Apparently, the gift of music was not to be easily redeemed.

After much frustration, I discovered that the redemption code is hidden in the email to the recipient. The code is the last 12 characters in the link that the "Redeem Now" button is attached to. So a copy & paste job from the href attribute in the email to a text editor and I had the redemption code.

Considering that Apple is known for the fantastic user-experience, this incident raises some questions. Particularly, the question "What the heck were Apple's designers thinking?" comes to mind. Any vital piece of information should be accessible in more than one way just in case the information flow doesn't work out as planned. That's a basic design principle.

I'm not angry at Apple, just disappointed.

I'm on Newsvine!

smithco.newsvine.com - smithco

Somehow I goy lucky and got one of the randomly sent out Newsvine invites. And so now I have a Newsvine profile at the above link. Send me an email if you want an invite from me.

C++ Tip: Easy install of Boost into MinGW

Since Boost is mostly implemented as a set of header files, it is possible to just drop the boost directory in the Boost distribution into a compiler's include directory for the C++ header files. For the case of MinGW with a default install, that directory is C:\MinGW\include\c++\3.4.2\ (adjust that for a different install location or version).

XEmacs tip: Add a Webpage entry for BibTeX

A useful BibTeX entry to have is that for BibTeX. The first step is to install the urlbst package. Then, to have the entry play nicely with the BibTeX autocompletion features in XEmacs, add the below code to the file init.el.

(defun my-bibtex-hook ()
(setq bibtex-mode-user-optional-fields '("location" "issn"))
(setq bibtex-entry-field-alist
(cons
'("Webpage" ((("url" "The URL of the page")
("title" "The title of the resource"))
(("author" "The author of the webpage")
("editor" "The editor/maintainer of the webpage")
("year" "Year of publication of the page")
("month" "Month of publication of the page")
("lastchecked" "Date when you last verified the page was there")
("note" "Remarks to be put at the end of the entry"))))
bibtex-entry-field-alist)))
(add-hook 'bibtex-mode-hook 'my-bibtex-hook)

XEmacs tip: Customise the mode based on file extensions

While most of the default modes based file extensions are sensible, it is good to know how to override the defaults.

The following code added to the file init.el will change the mode loading such that files with the extensions .l (the default is lisp-mode) and .vvp (an extension is not known by XEmacs) are loaded with the c++-mode.

(setq auto-mode-alist
(append
'(("\\.l$" . c++-mode)
("\\.vvp$" . c++-mode))
auto-mode-alist))

XEmacs tip: disable overwrite by INS key

It's easy to accidently go into overwrite mode by accidently hitting the Insert key. To prevent this, it is possible to remap the key by adding the following line to the file .xemacs/init.el.

(global-set-key [insert] "")