Chris Rodgers

I am a physical chemist working at the Oxford Centre for Clinical Magnetic Resonance Research and Merton College at the University of Oxford. Please follow one of the links above to find out more about me. The bar on the right of this page has links to other websites. Recent additions to my website are shown below.

This Microsoft support article explains how to prevent annoying password prompts that appear when downloading documents from password protected websites using Word 2007.

It is possible to gain root access on this router.

You need to follow the telnetEnable procedure on the web, using the username/password Gearguy/Geardog as for the previous routers.

Then, you telnet to port 23 and will get a “login:” prompt. At that prompt you can log in with “root” and “5up”.

Once at the Linux shell, the following commands are available:

There’s also a command “cli” with username “ambit” and password “ambitdebug” for configuring NAT and the Firewall.

You can download some useful utilities that I compiled for the MIPS processor on this box from

http://users.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/~crodgers/netgear/

and others from

http://rodgers.org.uk/netgear/

These include “busybox” with many commands and “dropbear” which provides
an SSH server and client.

Netgear have changed the software running on this router considerably since v3, so you have to figure things out yourself and cannot rely on old step-by-step instructions on the web.

There is a command “cli” which gets you into an interface similar to that for the old v3 routers. That command will prompt for an additional username “ambit” and password “ambitdebug”. Run it by typing “cli” and pressing enter at the root prompt.

Photographs of the inside of this router are available here.

If anyone discovers how to flash this router with OpenWRT or if they manage to open arbitrary ports to the WAN port in the firewall, please do let me know.

Serves 2

Ingredients:

6 Sainsbury’s Taste-the-difference venison sausages
6oz plain flour
2 large eggs
pinch of salt & pepper
6 fl oz milk
4 fl oz water

Instructions:

1. Place sausages in a pyrex / ceramic dish about 15 x 25cm and 3cm deep.
2. Bake at 220 deg C for 20 min.

Meanwhile, make batter by
3. Mix together flour, salt & pepper in a large bowl.
4. Make a well in the centre.
5. Place in the eggs.
6. Begin to whisk on high speed with an electric mixer, the flour will begin to incorporate into the edge of the well.
7. Slowly add in the milk / water whilst mixing.

8. Remove sausages from over. Drain off juice and keep for gravy.
9. Pour the batter over the hot sausages and immediately return to the oven for 20-25 min to complete cooking.

10. Serve with green vegetables and gravy (beef gravy granules + water + juice from step 8).

My HP iPAQ ran out of battery this morning. When I started it up, the memory was blank. When I tried to restore my files using Windows Mobile Device Center under Windows Vista, I got an annoying message saying that “Restore cannot be completed successfully. The selected backup file was created from a different type of mobile device.”

Aargh!

Fortunately, the kind people at http://www.filesaveas.com/pocketpcactivesync.html had the solution:

You’ll see this under a couple of circumstances: either you’ve recently done a software upgrade (a new release of the operating system / ROM upgrade) and are trying to restore a backup that applies to the older software operating system. More commonly, you’ll see this after having reset your machine, and the device is set to a different region to the region in use when it was backed up (it defaults to US English). Go to ‘Settings > System > Regional settings’, and switch to the appropriate language.

In my case, I had to set the language to English (UK) and then restore ran smoothly.

I hope this helps someone.

I own a Netgear WGT624 v4 router. This router runs a MIPS embedded version of Linux and I was curious whether it is possible to get shell access.

So far, I have failed, but in case anyone else is interested, I did find these things:

• There is a useful webpage with details about a similar router at http://www.castalie.org/projects/DM111P.html
• The latest firmware image is available from Netgear at ftp://downloads.netgear.com/files/WGT624v4-V2.0.13_2.0.14.chk.

• Root filesystem

  Using Fedora Core 9, it is possible to mount the root filesystem from this image.
  dd if=WGT624v4-V2.0.13_2.0.14.chk of=rootfs.image bs=1 skip=58
  mount rootfs.image /mnt/WGT624_rootfs -o loop

  Here is a tarball containing these files from the root filesystem.

  (It will be mounted using the squashfs LZMA filesystem.)

• Telnet access

  The router has a back door from the local LAN. A telnet server can be activated using the telnetenable utility.

  Unfortunately, I do not know the username and password to log on to the router with telnet.

• Root password

  There is a file in the above image called “shadow”, this holds an entry for the router root password:

  root:$1$$zdlNHiCDxYDfeF4MZL.H3/:10933:0:99999:7:::

  This is a FreeBSD MD5 password hash ($1$$zdlNHiCDxYDfeF4MZL.H3/) i.e. the MD5 checksum of the password is 7f1a6793eb3c3df9ac6a6460e5054c45.

  I have not yet been able to determine the password from this hash.

I scratched my flat screen (LCD or TFT) monitor some months ago. For a while, I’ve just lived with the damage. This evening, however, I tried a trick I found on the web. I rubbed hard on the scratch with a white pencil eraser. After about 3-4min vigorous rubbing, the deep scratches on my monitor have vanished. I can’t see them at all!

If you’re considering opening an account with the Halifax, my advice is don’t bother!

We recently moved house on 28 June. The same morning, I delivered change of address forms in person to our local branch. The woman behind the desk checked them, tapped the details into her computer and said that everything was fine.

Now, nearly a month on and after many telephone calls, our address details have still not been fully changed.

Yesterday, they also altered our joint account, spontaneously, with no authority from us, into my sole name. When my wife rang up to correct this, they refused to discuss the matter with her. When I called later, their operator said that she must have “dropped off the system”. Hmm… it makes one wonder what they would say the same if a few thousand pounds disappeared.

There are plenty of other issues, but I’m that this is enough to leave you forewarned.

This is a blog post made with Word 2007.

It contains the picture

And another

I found solutions to two long-standing irritations in Cygwin on Greg Coombe’s website.

Cygwin exit gives error message

Does exiting Cygwin sometimes generate a “Terminate Batch Job(Y/N)” message? If so, you’re probably using a Windows batch file to launch Cygwin. If the batch file doesn’t consist of much, then just put all of that information directly into the shortcut. For me, this meant replacing the Cygwin shortcut:
C:\cygwin\cygwin.bat

to this:
C:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe –login -i

Cygwin: Can’t quit Emacs using C-x C-c

On some installations of Cygwin on Windows XP, it is impossible to exit Emacs using C-x C-x. After digging around in the message lists, I found out that the C-x key is trapped by the OS. The fix for this is to set a Windows environment variable:
CYGWIN=tty

Then quit all of the Cygwin windows and start them up again. This worked for me.

My bank provides OFX format files for download from their Internet banking website. This short perl script ofx2txt converts these into tab delimited text files suitable to be opened in Excel.