Just a quick post to let you know I have made an update to VBoxLaunch so that it now works with the Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2.0 release and created it’s own page in the software section of my website. Unfortunately, this really is a quick and dirty hack (due to the change in default install location of VirtualBox) and so will no longer work if you happen to still have VirtualBox installed to C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox. When I get some more time, I will make a proper fix.
Archive for the 'Development' Category
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)
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.
Well WordPress 2.7 has been released, so I have performed the upgrade, along with grabbing the latest nightly build of K2. According to the K2 blog everything should be ok.
I’ve done a little more work on my System Restore point explorer, and it now actually allows you to explore
I’ve made use of the excellent AlphaVSS library which exposes the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) API’s as native .net objects. I’ve been having a few issues accessing these in Vista x64, but I have tested this in Vista x86 and it appears to be working ok. Again feedback is welcome via comments.
A couple of days ago my C: drive ran out of disk space and I was a little confused, because only a few days earlier I had around 30GB free, so I decided to do some digging and figure out where it had all gone…
Anyway to my surprise it had been consumed by Vista’s System Restore feature, I had installed a couple of applications, decided they weren’t for me and un-installed them. Each of these actions had created a new system restore point. After figuring out how to get access to the “C:\System Volume Information” folder (I don’t really recommend you do this) I saw that some of these system restore points were up to 3GB each in size, but I couldn’t find any way to delete them.
I googled a little and some people seemed to suggest that the Disk Cleanup Wizard would remove them, but it didn’t work for me, in fact the only way I reclaimed over 40GB of disk space was to disable (which does remove the data) and then re-enable system restore.
But what I really wanted was a way to delete individual restore points and I couldn’t find anything already out there, so I set about developing a solution myself.
The more I researched the more advanced I thougt I could make this tool, so currently it does what I first wanted, allows you to delete individual restore points. But I plan to add functionality that will allow you to mount a restore point and browse it’s contents (hence it’s name System Restore Explorer)
It’s not really ready for public consumption yet, but I am planning to upload a beta copy here tomorrow, and hopefully I can get some feedback
Update
Well, as promised here is a beta for people to play with, use this at your own risk, if it happens to trash your entire computer it’s not my fault! This program requires .net framework 3.5 and has been tested on Vista only.
I obviously missed this one, because it’s been out a couple of week’s, but I have now updated the K2 theme that I use to RC6. This is now fully compatible with WordPress 2.5 (I had previously been using some files from SVN)
Just a quick post to let you all know I have made a small update to the FireflyWHS setting plug-in to fix a problem reported over at the Firefly Media Server forums. In certain situations the plug-in would say that the Firefly service would need to be restarted, even though no changes had been made to it’s configuration, hopefully this is now fixed. Take a look at the bottom of my FireflyWHS page for the download link.
My favorite Hex editor is the excellent Hex Workshop. However, having just made the switch to Vista x64, I found that 32 bit shell extensions (which are COM dll’s) can not be loaded by 64 bit processes such as explorer.exe. So I hade a quick look around and came across this article by Michael Dunn and from this I have created an x64 shell extension for Hex Workshop. Feel free to download it here, just copy it to your Hex Workshop folder and register it. It was built using Visual Studio 2008, so you may need the latest MS runtime’s.
C:\Program Files (x86)\BreakPoint Software\Hex Workshop v5>regsvr32 hwext64.dll
I recently bought some more memory for my laptop, mainly ‘just because’. I mean there was nothing really wrong with 2GB, but memory is so cheap at the moment…
Anyway, after removing the panel on the bottom of the laptop and removing the old memory, I inserted the new 2GB SO-DIMM’s and now I have 4GB, or do I?
I already had an idea from reading around I had done and also the experience of my boss, that I was only going to be able to see 3GB of RAM, however to my surprise Vista SP1 reported that I had 4GB This is a new useless feature of SP1, however it can still only use 3GB 
So I have taken the plunge and installed Vista x64, so far so good, but why oh why are there 2 ‘Program Files’. I mean I understand the reason behind this, but there just seems to be a random mismatch of both x86 and x64 binaries in both folders So they might as well all be in one place in my opinion.
So now I better see if I can build some x64 native binaries 