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.

We played host to the Royal Society of Chemistry’s ESR group annual conference (“ESR 2007″) here in Oxford this week. I was delighted to be able to talk about my research, and it was great to meet many eminent scientists working on ESR over dinner.

The conference website gives details of the scientific programme and a selection of photographs.

This weekend I went to visit an old friend who now works on the Isle of Man. It’s an amazing place and I really enjoyed the chance to escape the DPhil writing up and go and walk up various “bumps”!

This is the arms of the Isle of Man

It was pretty windy in March, although not especially cold. This picture is fairly typical of the coastline

Here are my friend and I at the top of the South Barrule

The pdfcolour utility allows one to split a PDF file apart to give two separate PDFs, one containing the colour pages and the other containing the B&W pages. That way, one can easily print the B&W pages on a faster, cheaper printer and reassemble the document by hand.

Instructions:

Download the pdfcolour-1.2.tgz file.
Extract it using tar -xzf pdfcolour-1.2.tgz
Recompile if necessary using the command “make”.
Run on a PDF with splitcolour input.pdf bw.pdf colour.pdf

This program has been tested on Linux (Fedora 10) and Cygwin (Vista x64).

For our American friends, this program will split a PDF into separate color and black/white files.

I found a useful article that explains how one can use emacs to find/replace in several files at once:
http://xahlee.org/emacs/find_replace_inter.html.

We woke up to a beautiful scene this morning: at our house there was 8cm of snow. Everything was white! Cycling in to town was something of an adventure. I saw this snowman in Hertford College.

I made this cake (inspired by an internet recipe) this evening. It tastes delicious and is nice and moist inside so I thought I would share the recipe.

Banana, date & walnut cake (Chris’ variation)

Equipment

bowls, scales, electric mixer, microwave, oven, loaf tin

Ingredients

100g dried dates
50g dark rum
175g self raising flour
125 g butter
150g sugar
2 large eggs
4 small/2 large etc but about 300g without skin, VERY ripe bananas, mashed
60 g walnuts
1 tsp vanilla extract
23×13x7cm loaf (2lb) tin, buttered & floured (or it won’t come out!) or paper lined

Recipe

Chop dates into small chunks
Place dates in a small bowl and pour over the rum
Cover and microwave on full power for 1 minute
Remove the lid and let the alcohol boil off
Leave to soak until needed

Turn oven on and set to 180°C (I have a fan oven, adjust temperature to suit yours).

Weigh flour into a medium bowl

In a mixing bowl: soften butter and cream together with the sugar
Beat in eggs one at a time.
Add mashed banana, dates, walnuts and vanilla extract.
Add flour mix, 1/3 at a time, mixing well after each addition.

Pour/scrape into tin. Bake in middle of oven for 50–60 min, until a skewer comes out clean.
Leave in tin on wire rack to cool for 5 minutes before turning out.

Icing

150 g icing sugar
100 g low fat cream cheese
1 tsp cinnamon

Mix together until it has a smooth consistency. Top the cake with this mixture.

N.B. The current icing is too sweet and overpowers the cake a bit. Need to think how to tone it down. Perhaps by adding butter. Perhaps by adding banana to the icing, or lemon juice.

I use a piece of software called Bacula to make backups of the data on our home PC’s and on various websites.

Version 2.0 of Bacula has just been released!

I have built a set of RPMs for fedora core 4. They were built using this spec file in the following procedure.

Installing v2.0

Configure

CFLAGS=”-g -Wall” ./configure \
–prefix=/usr \
–sbindir=/usr/sbin \
–sysconfdir=/etc/bacula \
–with-scriptdir=/etc/bacula \
–enable-smartalloc \
–enable-gnome \
–with-mysql \
–with-working-dir=/var/bacula \
–with-pid-dir=/var/run \
–with-subsys-dir=/var/lock/subsys \
–enable-conio

Then copy bacula.spec to ~/bacula_v2

Then cp bacula-2.0.0.tar.gz ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/

wget ‘http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/bacula/depkgs-04Jan07.tar.gz’

Edit bacula.spec to refer to this depkgs version at the top.

[chris@lilac bacula_v2]$ cd bacula-2.0.0
[chris@lilac bacula-2.0.0]$ ls
ABOUT-NLS ChangeLog config.out COPYING kernstodo Makefile.in platforms README scripts technotes-1.39
AUTHORS CheckList config.status examples LICENSE manpages po README.AIX src updatedb
autoconf config.log configure INSTALL Makefile patches projects ReleaseNotes SUPPORT VERIFYING
[chris@lilac bacula-2.0.0]$ mkdir /tmp/tt
[chris@lilac bacula-2.0.0]$ cp ReleaseNotes /tmp/tt/Release_Notes-2.0.0-1.txt
[chris@lilac bacula-2.0.0]$ cd /tmp/tt
[chris@lilac tt]$ tar -czvf Release_Notes-2.0.0-1.tar.gz Release_Notes-2.0.0-1.txt
Release_Notes-2.0.0-1.txt
[chris@lilac tt]$ cp Release_Notes-2.0.0-1.tar.gz ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/

cp bacula-docs-2.0.0.tar.gz ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/

cd ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/
[chris@lilac SOURCES]$ wget ‘http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/bacula/bacula-rescue-2.0.0.tar.gz’

Edit bacula.spec to refer to this version.

Then rpmbuild -ba –define ‘build_fc4 1′ –define ‘build_mysql 1′ –define ‘build_mysql4 1′ bacula.spec

[root@lilac ~]# /etc/bacula/bacula stop
Stopping the Bacula File daemon
Stopping the Bacula Storage daemon
Stopping the Bacula Director daemon

A family member recently asked me how they could get access to an old PC running Windows XP Pro, whose administrator password they no longer knew. I found this tool invaluable. It reset the password in a matter of minutes and with no problems.

Links

• Offline NT Password & Registry Editor, Bootdisk / CD
• Mirror of the CD ISO from the above website
• List of tools for resetting Windows passwords

I am enjoying a relaxing time with my family over Christmas. I wish you too a merry Christmas and a happy new year.