Nic's Blog

Maintenance

Nic — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:10:41 +0000

I’ve updated to WordPress 3.0 and whilst at it also updated the version of K-2 I was using. Everything appears to be working but if anyone notices any strange behaviour please let me know.

VBoxLaunch – minor update

Nic — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:20:04 +0000

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.

I’m still here

Nic — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 12:58:55 +0000

Sorry about the recent downtime, my host appears to have had some major problems, and when they finally did bring the server back online it had a new IP address, so I had to update my name servers, blah blah blah.

And to make matters worst for me, this all happened last week whilst I was away at Microsoft’s UK Techdays event in London. Anyway, my host’s server problem now seem to be stabilising, so hopefully no more downtime (but don’t hold your breath)

VBoxLaunch

Nic — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:48:58 +0000

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

Nic — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:01:31 +0000

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.

Happy New Year

Nic — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:20 +0000

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

Nic — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:36:39 +0000

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

Nic — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:49:04 +0000

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

Nic — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:49:04 +0000

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

Nic — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:53:58 +0000

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.