Hopper Disassembler

I’ve been using a new disassembler a lot over the last couple of weeks called Hopper.  I’m finding it to be well worth the money.  So much so that I initially purchased it through the Apple App store, and then purchased it again directly from the developer so I could get access to the latest version more quickly.

It has many of the features of IDA Pro at a fraction of the cost!

It is alive again

I got another email from the awesome tech support guys at Drobo this morning asking about my DroboPro. I told them it had died again and they offered to replace it rather cheaply, they also suggested that both batteries might need to be replaced rather than just the CR2032 coin cell. I removed the main backup battery pack and pressed the power button and the thing booted up. I’m not shutting the thing down again until I’m sure I’ve got ALL of the data this time πŸ˜‰

IT LIVES!

After a small hint from one of the Drobo tech support staff I was able to fix my DroboPro πŸ™‚

It turns out that there is a little CR2032 coin cell on the main board that had gone flat.  I replaced that and the machine came good πŸ™‚

YAY!

My DroboPro just died :(

It is almost 4 years old, so it has served me reasonably well. I have backups of most of the data, but there may be some things I have lost. Ah well. I’ve been wanting to open the thing up and have a look inside for a while now. They are quite nicely built I have to say. It is all back together at the moment, but I’ll probably rip it to bits again and take some pictures.

Nabaztag

I have been having some fun lately playing around with my old Nabaztag rabbit.  A little while ago I managed to get the compiler for the little VM running in the Nabaztag working under Mac OS X.  The compiler also comes with a simulator, and unfortunately the Linux version that I got running under OS X didn’t have much of a UI.  Last night I hacked together a little OpenGL based UI that shows the status of the LEDs.  The next thing to do is add on the ears πŸ™‚
I have to say that my UI looks nicer than the Windows one πŸ˜‰

FrontDoor

This weekend I built a simple little Linux program that scratches an particular itch of mine.  As part of my daily work I need to log in to various Linux VMs.  The problem is that the IP addresses of these VMs often changes due to them being configured to use DHCP.  I suppose I could have changed them to have static IP addresses, but that would be too easy πŸ˜‰

Instead I have written a little program I call FrontDoor that gets loaded by getty and displays some basic information about the host, including things like the IP address and so on.  Now I can just look at the VM on my desktop and see the IP address at a glance πŸ™‚