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.

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.

I used the excellent bib2endnote project recently as a starting point to convert a DocArc library of references into EndNote format. This method retains any attachments.

Brief notes

:

Modify “docarc” binary, changing:

sub new
  {
  my $self = LWP::UserAgent::new( @_ );
  $self->agent( “getbibitem/$Version” );
  $self;
  }

to

    sub new
    {
        my $self = LWP::UserAgent::new( @_ );
        $self->timeout(60000); # Use a stupidly long timeout!
        $self->agent( “getbibitem/$Version” );
        $self;
    }

in order to prevent timeouts.

In an empty directory, run “docarc -d -r files dummy.bib ‘*’ ” to generate a dummy.bib file containing the BibTeX references and a directory full of attached files.

Next, install NetBeans and modify bib2endnote slightly to support DocArc’s extended BibTeX fields (code supplied on request).

Run the conversion and load the generated XML into EndNote using Import XML option. Copy all DocArc attached files in the C:\CTR_TMP.

In EndNote, select all references. Right-click and choose to Convert all file attachments to relative links.

Remove C:\CTR_TMP.

Check the library and clean up any errors.

Finally, you can manipulate an EndNote library very easily by copying the files from the .Data directory into a MySQL database directory. They are in MySQL format and can then be queried / modified via MySQL before being copied back. After copying back, replace the .enl file with one of zero length and it will be regenerated form the .data directory after restarting EndNote.

We went for a lovely walk with my family yesterday in the grounds of Blenheim Palace. There are a few public rights of way through the grounds, which you do not need to pay to use. The one we prefer begins on the A44 (”The Causeway”) here

You enter through the green gate marked “95″

All this is shown on Google maps and the Ordnance Survey (grid ref SP435165) shows the rights of way.