VBoxLaunch

Published on February 18, 2010 in Development, Tools and Windows. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I’m a big fan of Windows 7 and it’s new features, one of those being the Jump Lists. I’m also a big fan of VirtualBox for my development, testing and isolation needs, at least I can run a virtual x64 machine and connect to it for kernel mode debugging, which is something I can’t do with Virtual PC.

Anyway, as much as I’d like to see this actually built into the Windows VirtualBox GUI, I suspect it’s not high priority for the Sun developers and I’m far too lazy to setup a dev environment with all the pre-requrisites to actually build VirtualBox myself. So here’s a little hack work-around I created, to slightly improve the VirtualBox experience from the Windows 7 start menu.

If you’d like to make use of my small little app, then please feel free to download it from here, just extract the binary to your VirtualBox install folder, create a shortcut to VBoxLaunch.exe and drag it into your start menu. The first time you run VBoxLaunch it will query all of your VirtualBox VM’s and create a custom jump list for them,  you should then be able to start your selected VM directly, without the need to launch the VirtualBox GUI each time.

This tool requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5, should already exist on Windows 7 :) and was developed and tested on Windows 7 x64 (but there is no reason why it shouldn’t work on 32bit Windows 7 too)

Read Chip & PIN / EMV Card

Published on January 27, 2010 in Development, Tools and Windows. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Recently I’ve been working on a tool to allow you to read the contents of the chip on your Chip & PIN / EMV card and to decode some of the values. A lot of the information wont mean much without reading lots of long and complicated specs. But for anyone who’s interested and who has access to a PC/SC complient smart card reader on Windows here’s an example of the data that can be read.

EMV Card Browser

Read more

Happy New Year

Published on January 1, 2010 in Personal and Website. 0 Comments

I know I have been quiet lately, but I think my blog posting hasn’t been too bad in 2009. So my aim this year, is to be just as good (hopefully better, but you don’t want to set your goals too high!)

Hope everyone who reads this (and who knows me) has a great 2010!

Holiday Time

Published on September 21, 2009 in Personal and Photography. 0 Comments

Well first of all I better apologise for the lack of updates recently, the first reason is my laziness, and the second is the fact I have been away on holiday (vacation). Anyway, I will try and get back into the swing of things over the following few months, and then before we know it, it will be Christmas ;)

In the meantime here are a few holiday photo’s (from the North East of England) for those who are interested.

Site upgrade

Published on June 11, 2009 in Personal and Website. 0 Comments

I have just upgraded to Wordpress 2.8. I tried the ‘Upgrade Automatically’ button, but guess what, it failed :( 

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8.zip
Unpacking the core update
Could not copy file: /wordpress/wp-content/upgrade/core/wordpress/wp-comments-post.php
Installation Failed

So I had to do it manually… At least everything appears to be working now, if you notice any problems, then please let me know.

Downtime

Published on June 1, 2009 in Personal and Website. 0 Comments

Apparently my site has been suffering with some downtime lately, this has now been tracked down to a problem on one of my hosts servers, they have now moved my site to a new server and DNS should finalise by 3rd June.

Mark’s Stag Day

Published on May 11, 2009 in Personal and Photography. 0 Comments

Just got back from a great weekend in Bournemouth. Saturday afternoon was spent quad biking and clay pigeon shooting (which I haven’t done before). As I was part of the dual activity group I lent my camera to Andy. Here are a few photos from the quad biking session.

Windows Home Server Power Pack 2 – RTM

Published on March 24, 2009 in Windows Home Server. 0 Comments

The Windows Home Server Team have Announced Power Pack 2. Allegedly, starting today, Power Pack 2 is to be made available via Windows Update. I’ll be checking out my home server this evening, when I get home and keep you posted.

I’m guessing (and hoping) that PP2 will be able to correctly detect a Windows 7 client.

Edit: Yes it does recognise Windows 7 as a client :)

Golden Wedding

Published on March 9, 2009 in Personal and Photography. 0 Comments

Julie and I have just spent the weekend in Hambleton, for Margret and Tony Knox’s Golden Wedding Aniversary, we had a great weekend and as usual I took loads of photo’s. Here are a selection.

Skiing 2009

Published on February 13, 2009 in Personal and Photography. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

A couple of friends and myself have just gotten back from a good weeks skiing in the 3 Valleys. We stayed in the Residence Les Sentiers Du Tueda in Meribel-Mottaret. Here are a few photo’s that were taken during the week. Mostly the holiday consisted of skiing, eating lasagna and drinking beer. With the odd game of Uno and Pass the Pigs.