Kev's Development Toolbox

December 6, 2013

Expanding a Virtual Box Windows XP virtual disk

The .vdi file can be expanded using the same vboxmanage command as here. To use the expanded diskspace in XP you can either create a new partition from within XP (using the Computer Management tool from Control Panel/Admin Tools), or you can expand the current partition size to fill the available space.

To expand an existing partition, you’ll need to boot the virtual machine with a ISO disk image containing some disk utils, something like GParted. Attach the ISO disk image to your virtual machine and boot it up. Use the GParted tool to resize the partition, then shutdown, remove the mounted ISO and reboot Windows. It will now see the expanded partition size.

November 24, 2013

AOL set to can Nullsoft and Winamp next month

Wow. I have so many memories of downloading and using Winamp to play that new music file format back in the day, MP3 files.

AOL has just announced they are shutting down Nullsoft, the organization behind Winamp, which they bought for $100M in 1999.

But recent rumors are that Microsoft may step in and buy Nullsoft?

November 21, 2013

Software Defined Radio on the Raspberry Pi

There’s a range of cheap (< $20) USB Digital TV receivers that due to their wide tuning range can be used as Software Defined Radios (SDR) when combined with other software to tune and receive the signal from the dongle.

RTL chipset dongles are supported by open source software rtl-sdr. Download the source to your Pi and build following the instructions on their website. By running as follows:

rtl_tcp -a your_ip_address

you can stream the data received from the dongle inserted into your Pi to other software running elsewhere (your desktop/laptop) like SDR Sharp (by pointing it to the IP address of the Pi) which you can use to control the tuning of the dongle.

November 13, 2013

Deploying a Maven-based web project from Eclipse

Here’s the problem: you start with a Web project in Eclipse, created via one of the Wizards. At some point you convert it to a Maven project, but when you deploy the project from Eclipse, your web content in /src/main/webapp is not deployed, because Eclipse is not aware of the Maven folder structure.

I’ve done this multiple times in the past and usually work out a way to build a ear/war and manually deploy it to my server or via a script instead, because I can’t work out how to get a converted project to deploy in Eclipse 🙂

The magic to get this to work is to add the maven-war-plugin to your Maven pom.xml file:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.3</version>
    <configuration>
        <failOnMissingWebXml>false</failOnMissingWebXml>
    </configuration>
</plugin>