These are the ramblings of Matthijs Kooijman, concerning the software he hacks on, hobbies he has and occasionally his personal life.
Most content on this site is licensed under the WTFPL, version 2 (details).
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My old blog (pre-2006) is also still available.
See also my Mastodon page.
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I just got home, and looking at today I think it is a good day. I started out early with a (moderately boring) class, followed by a practical exercise. This exercise was finished halfway the afternoon, after which I continued to Tim's final thesis presentation. He is the first of "my" Inter-Actief board to finish his education, and more of us will follow soon.
After the presentation, there were drinks. Halfway through, we (the former board members from his year) gave another presentation. It was a short pop quiz about Tim's years at university (in the style of "Dit was het nieuws"). There where lots of embarassing pictures, which led to lots of laughs.
After that, I continued straight to the Pro Deo new years diner. This was a night of good food, good talks and nice people. Everyone had cooked a piece of the meal, in groups. I had prepared tea, coffee, apple pie with a Mondriaan painting on it and cake with DIY topping, all of which people liked a lot. During the evening, there was also an auctioning game, which I happened to win (largely due to strategical bidding, and a little due to luck, since Marijn had adopted the same strategy :-).
So, all in all, today was quit good and I am content. The only thing that sucked today, was that the wind was blowing in the opposite direction all day...
In the last few weeks I've been playing around with embedded Linux. Bert, a flatmate, brought two old thin clients from his work. They're bot Wyse WT8440XL devices, containing a 400Mhz K6-II processor, some peripherals, and a "DiskOnChip". This last one is flash device that is used instead of a hard disk. It's soldered directly onto the mainboard and as far as I can tell, it interfaces with the system directly into the memory controller, similar to what a BIOS chip does. Anyway, this means I have no hard disk to put a full OS on, but only 96MB of flash storage (And yes, I know I can just plug in some USB storage, which is even what I do for testing, but not using the internal flash chip wouldn't be half as much fun :-p)
It feels a bit weird to write about windows, but perhaps other people have some use for this.
At Inter-Actief, we normally log in with non-privileged accounts. Every now and then, we (the sysadmins) want to do something with privileges. For this, we use the runas utility, which is included with Windows XP by default. It runs a given command with different privileges (after entering a password, of course).
One of these things is browsing the file system and copying files. In other words, you want to get an explorer window with privileges. Simply running
runas.exe /user:Administrator explorer
Doesn't work. This will notice there is already a running explorer process and let that existing process open a new window instead (which will not have privileges).
Previously, we misused Internet Explorer for accomplishing this. Internet Explorer is really just another face of explorer (But with a different process name), so if you would start a new instance of Internet Explorer and navigate to "C:" instead of an url, you'd get a perfectly usable explorer, running as Administrator.
For example,
runas.exe /user:Administrator "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe C:\"
gets you a fancy new explorer window, but only when using IE6. Internet Explorer 7 dropped all those explorer-like features (which is a good thing, btw), but now this trick doesn't work anymore.
Some googling around gave me Aaron Margosis' blog who describes some trick with setting a "run explorer windows in separate processes"-flag for the Administrator user.
This is all nice and fancy, but I won't be logging into every client here to set that bit, only to do it again (or more annoying, forget it) whenever we reinstall a machine.
Fortunately, badri commented another trick: Use the /separate flag to
explorer. This forces explorer to run as a seperate process, ignoring any
already running instances. This gives a command line such as:
runas.exe /user:Administrator "explorer.exe /separate,C:\"
Be careful to include the "," there, between /separate and the path. I'm
not sure why it is there, but it doesn't work without.
This ended up as bit longer post than I intended, but at least I'm writing again.