ewanm89’s blog

For those that don’t know, windows has a virtual device filesystem much like /dev on linux, however you are not able to query it directly. Part of this filesystem includes UUID like volume identifying. Windows actually uses these to assign the right drive letters to the right partitions.

Anyway, why am I droning on about all this? Well I wanted to setup VirtualBox (xVM) to directly access a flash drive a couple of months ago, now while in the documentation it told how to do it. They never mentioned how to find the volume name to do it with in the documentation. Anyway after a while trying to find out on google and not succeeding I gave up.

A couple of weeks ago I had a slight problem with some ntfs corruption, so I wiped the windows XP partition and installed Windows 7 RC x64. Next I tried to get EXT2IFS to read the linux filesystems, and while this worked fine in Vista compatibility mode (to bypass an OS check in the installer) Windows would not remember the drive letter assignments on reboot. So reading the EXT2IFS FAQ mentioned mountvol for manually getting volume UUID names and manually mounting volumes.

As this is exactly what I needed for VirtualBox and to put it in black and white for google and such.

To get Windows Volume Device Names of detectected partitions (mounted or not) one can use mountvol in cmd.

I wrote a little powershell script to mount each ext volume and put it in wondows task schedular to run automatically each system startup as the system account (only way to run something at startup with admin rights without UAC popups) and have reported the problem to the EXT2IFS developer.

Sometime ago I made an anti rickroll greasemonkey script, however I managed to lose it (with a few other pieces of mostly unimportant data).
I’ve finally got around to starting to rewrite it. You can find it on http://userscripts.org/

This does not 100% block rickrolls, however it does try. Please test so I can improve it.

I’ve created a gentoo overlay at rsync://ewanm89.co.uk/ewanm89/

Currently it has get_iplayer ebuild (a perl script that uses iphone hack to download drm free of bbc iplayer) and rtmpdump ebuild (an app that get_iplayer uses to download the rtmp flash streams off bbc iplayer). It can also be viewed over http.

Currently this is most usefull to people in the UK but I’ll likely be adding more ebuilds in the future.

Trying http://imified.com/, seems to be an awesome service… In fact, I’m writing this blogpost through it

edit: Seem to not quite have worked… Maybe it converts to links automatically, more experimentation needed.

I haven’t posted of late…, I mean 15 days… I thought I asked you to remind me

Anyway, back at uni. Still unsure on whether to release anti-rickroll script…

I’m fed up of these youtube rickrolls, so I’ve made a nice little greasemonkey script to do this instead.

Unfortunately if I upload script people will know how to rickroll me, and I don’t want that… So I have a bit of a dilemma…

To help my part in the current wave amongst Linux bloggers: “cat ~/.histfile|awk ‘{a[$1]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head” (yes I use zsh) gives:

408 sudo
143 vim
137 ssh
137 ls
135 cd
86 dmesg
52 make
43 pkill
37 ps
32 plog

So I do far too much as root… too much in vim and too much on other computers, and why do I keep using cd?

When setting this server I ran into a a couple of problems, this has bought up a couple of questions:

1. How can apache manage some URL rewrite rules without mod_rewrite being enabled?
2. Why isn’t MySQL using UTF8 by default already?

If you have a laptop and it has a cardreader that doesn’t seem to work on linux.

This one lspci reports as:
06:04.1 FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc ENE PCI Memory Stick Card Reader Controller (rev 01)
06:04.2 Generic system peripheral [0805]: ENE Technology Inc ENE PCI Secure Digital Card Reader Controller (rev 01)
06:04.3 FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc: (rev 01)
06:04.4 FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc SD/MMC Card Reader Controller (rev 01)

Check, for /dev/ files that look lik /dev/mmcblk0 and /dev/mmcblk0p1. It may just work (on recent kernels).

mount with something like “sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt”

All the files will be under /mnt/ in this example.

and don’t forget to umount it with “sudo umount /mnt” before you yank it out.

I’ve been following openmoko for quite a few months now and actually started getting a multiuser environment together, development version of the neo-1973 is out. However parents won’t let me order one . Please mum, I need it for development, qemu is just too tedious for such development.

Good news is in a few weeks I’ll hopefully have a bank account I can use to order it.

For those of you that have read this blog and got confused, see http://openmoko.org/ and http://openmoko.com/