Shankar Chakkere's Blog

Like many I use thumb drive. I store personal information in it. I want to protect that information even if I lose that drive. I use TrueCrypt, an open source cross platform disk encryption software. It creates an encrypted file system on a file with a password. When I mount this file, it appears as a drive.

In the above picture it appears as drive W: You can use it as a normal drive.

When I am done I will unmount it, also if the drive is not used for long time it unmounts itself. TrueCrypt has many other features like Traveler Mode. There is no Mac OS X port yet.Mac OS X version of TrueCrypt.

Labels: Utilities

Did you accidentally erased photos/files from compact flash disk? Recuva can recover these deleted files. Recuva is a freeware.


It goes without saying that the flash disk should not have been used after erasing to recover the files.

Note: Most of the camera uses FAT file system. FAT file system just changes the first character in the file name to a special character, without deleting the file content.
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Labels: Photography, Utilities

findref is one of the program I use on daily basis. It a small opensource program (a single C source file written by Mr. Brian Wilson) that can be complied with any decent C compiler. It finds all references to a string in a C/C++ files in current directory and its subdirectory.
e.g.

c:\wx\samples>findref -i wxarraystring
.\console\console.cpp(259):         wxArrayString args = wxCmdLineParser::ConvertStringToArgs(cmdline);
.\console\console.cpp(399):     wxArrayString files;
.\console\console.cpp(587):     wxArrayString output;
.\console\console.cpp(835):     wxArrayString dirs = fn.GetDirs();
.\console\console.cpp(1672):     wxArrayString mimetypes;
.\console\console.cpp(1678):     wxArrayString exts;
.\console\console.cpp(3206):     wxArrayString files;
.\console\console.cpp(3349):             wxArrayString files;
.\console\console.cpp(3815):     wxArrayString volumes = wxFSVolume::GetVolumes();
.\console\console.cpp(5622): static void PrintArray(const wxChar* name, const wxArrayString& array)
.\console\console.cpp(6260):         wxArrayString a1;
.\console\console.cpp(6272):         wxArrayString a2(a1);
.\dialogs\dialogs.cpp(516):         wxArrayString paths, filenames;
.\dialup\nettest.cpp(305):     wxArrayString names;
.\dnd\dnd.cpp(87):                              const wxArrayString& filenames);
.\dnd\dnd.cpp(1372):     wxArrayString filenames;
.\dnd\dnd.cpp(1481): bool DnDFile::OnDropFiles(wxCoord, wxCoord, const wxArrayString& filenames)
.\exec\exec.cpp(124):                     const wxArrayString& output,
.\exec\exec.cpp(684):         wxArrayString output, errors;
.\exec\exec.cpp(927):                          const wxArrayString& output,
.\font\font.cpp(345):     const wxArrayString& GetFacenames() const
.\font\font.cpp(356):         wxArrayString m_facenames;
.\listbox\lboxtest.cpp(524):     wxArrayString items;
.\listbox\lboxtest.cpp(635):     wxArrayString items;
.\mobile\wxedit\wxedit.h(60):     wxArrayString   m_history;
.\widgets\combobox.cpp(334):     wxArrayString items;
.\widgets\listbox.cpp(345):     wxArrayString items;
.\widgets\listbox.cpp(454):     wxArrayString items;
.\widgets\widgets.cpp(291):     wxArrayString labels;

Where -i is ignore case. It has many other options like not to span some directory.

I then use vim + line_number somefile.cpp to start editing the file.
Its also useful to find out how a variable is used in a project.

You can use grep along with find command, but findref is lot more convenient.

Next time I will write about how to use GNU ID utils, GLOBAL, Source Navigator and CSCOPE as C source tag system.

Labels: debug

You made a change in the source code, now there is some problem. Things are not working the same as before. Sounds familiar, you ask What was the last change I made? There are different tools designed just for that. The mother of all is the venerable diff command, a unix command line utility. The diff command can be used with another command line utility patch to bring the old version of source code to the current revision.

On MS Windows I use Winmerge. Winmerge is an Open Source visual file differencing (diff) and merging tool(patch) . It only works on windows platform.


diff can be used with binary files, which is a useful feature if you are an embedded developer.

Labels: debug

If you represent anything graphically, it becomes easy to understand. If the directories and files are represented by blocks whose size depends on size they occupy! You can instantly see which directory or file is a space hog. This graphical representation of things is called treemap

There are many utilities which use treemap to show sizes of files and folders.
Here are the ones which I use:

With OS X
Disk Inventory X


With Windows
Windirstat


For Linux/KDE
Kdirstat

Labels: Utilities

Nero image files (.NRG) is proprietary media image file created by Nero AG a German software company. It’s created when you save the disk image rather than burn it directly on the media. Nero does not support OS X.


You can use the Nero image files on OSX if you have Toast Titanium. The Toast can mount this image (.NRG) and burn an image on the media. The mounted image can be browsed using Finder.

Steps:

1. Start Toast Titanium


2. Select Copy tab


3. Select Image File under Format


4. Drag the .nrg image file onto toast


5. Select media type CD/DVD


6. Press Burn

Labels: OS X