Entries for LeoDavidson

That Sophos Win 7 stuff... What a load of rubbish. [That Sophos Win 7 stuff... What a load of rubbish.]

LeoDavidson — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:34:23 GMT

(This is an edit of an email I just wrote to someone. Thought I'd share it here as well, if just to say, "please don't lump all of us in with this stupidness.")

http://www.sophos.com/blogs/chetw/g/2009/11/03/windows-7-vulnerable

^ What a load of rubbish. I cringed when I read it.

Sophos should've just said, "Hey, BTW, just a reminder, but you still need anti-virus with Windows 7. You shouldn't be surprised by this. Please consider our product." Instead they're acting as if someone promised Windows 7 would make malware impossible. (WTF did they get that idea from?)

It's also frustrating to read reports from people saying Sophos showed malware "bypassing UAC" when it's just avoiding the requirement for admin access, something quite different.

The whole UAC debate is frustrating. Whichever position you find yourself in it seems you end up arguing with people in every direction. There aren't sides to the debate; it's a mad free-for-all that spawns little useful discussion. So much time & energy is spent arguing about stupid stuff -- like the notion that UAC is supposed to stop code from running at all rather than, at best, limit what running code can do -- that there's no room left to discuss the more subtle and interesting points. By the time they're raised everyone's too tired and annoyed to do them justice. It's a shame.

It's a strange debate indeed where those who, on the face of it, are pushing in the same direction frustrate me far more than anyone pushing the other way.

Music, religion, politics... I think UAC needs to be added to that list! :-)

in reply to That Sophos Win 7 stuff... What a load of rubbish.

Free Wallace & Gromit adventure game episod [Free Wallace & Gromit adventure game episod]

LeoDavidson — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:39:13 GMT

Free Wallace & Gromit adventure game episode (this week only):

http://www.telltalegames.com/wallaceandgromit20th

This is by the same people who gave away a free Monkey Island episode a little while back, which I think some people here enjoyed. I figured this might be fun as well and, hey, it's free.

Haven't played it myself but these Wallace & Gromit adventure episode games been on my (veeeeery, very long) gaming to-do list for a while. I really liked Telltale's recent Sam & Max games and I like the Wallace & Gromit TV shows so I'll probably enjoy this when I get around to it.

(I still haven't played the original Monkey Island yet, let alone the Telltale installments, heh. So many games, so little time.)

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NForce SATA drivers [NForce SATA drivers]

LeoDavidson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:00:25 GMT

NForce motherboard, with SSD drives (or who just want SMART to work), and Windows 7:

Go into Device Manager and find the NVidia SATA controllers. Click Update Driver, tell it to let you choose from a list and switch it to "Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller", which should be included in the short list of compatible drivers Windows presents. You'll then have to reboot.

Windows 7 will now actually know that your drive is an SSD an optimize itself accordingly. You'll also be able to use TRIM properly (if your drive supports it), and use SMART monitoring tools (other than CrystalDiskInfo which is about the only thing clever enough to access SMART via the NVidia drivers), and stuff like the Intel SSD Toolbox, which couldn't talk to the drive before. Apparently it also massively increases performance, at least with SSDs.

All this because NVidia are still being ****ing ********s and making their IDE/SATA drivers present the drives to the OS as SCSI, which breaks just about everything except basic file access. I wish NVidia would admit that this was a bad idea and stop it, but you can stop it yourself by switching to Microsoft's generic driver and it seems that there are only upsides to doing so.

PS: You can tell if Windows 7 knows your drive is an SSD or not by whether or not it offers to schedule defrags for it. If you click the Schedule button in the defrag tool it should list the drives with checkboxes next to them, excluding any SSD drives. With the NVidia drivers my SSD was listed; with the Microsoft drivers it is not, as should be the case.

PPS: Just had a thought: You probably shouldn't do this if you're using NVidia's RAID stuff. Not sure if it'll still work under the generic drivers.

in reply to NForce SATA drivers

MS to document the PST format [MS to document the PST format]

LeoDavidson — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:52:33 GMT

This seems like good news:

Roadmap for Outlook Personal Folders (.pst) Documentation

(Found via Paul Thurrott's post.)

Once the docs are there I hope someone will write something that lets me move my inbox from Outlook to Windows Live Mail. :-)

in reply to MS to document the PST format

Can the new Win7 AppCompat shims be disabled per exe? [Can the new Win7 AppCompat shims be disabled per exe?]

LeoDavidson — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:56:10 GMT

Windows 7 has added some new application compatibility shims that are sometimes applied automatically when a process crashes. In particular there's DISABLEUSERCALLBACKEXCEPTION.

Is there a way to turn off automatic shimming for specific executables?

The shims are good for apps I use as, for example, they stop Windows Live Messenger from crashing at startup.

However, the shims are really annoying and counter-productive for apps I write (or write plugins for). They get applied if I a bug in my code crashes the app. They then mask similar bugs, so I can't tell they are there, until I turn the shim off again via regedit. They also get applied if I intentionally call _CrtDebugBreak (either directly or by clicking Debug when an assert fails).

(It's not applied for every crash/bug. Crashes or _CrtDebugBreak calls in code called by window message handlers often seem to trigger the shim fairly often.)

I've tried setting the registry values which disable the Vista-style AppCompat shims (which are stored in the same place in the registry) but that doesn't seem to suppress the new Windows 7 shims. I think it just turns off shims that are about OS-version compatibility rather than these new shims that seem more about general bugs/application stability.

Anyone know how to stop these shims? Maybe another registry setting or something we can put in the exe manifest?

If you want to see if your own exes have been shimmed, look for values matching your exe path here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers

And here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Compatibility Assistant\Persisted

(Something appearing in the second area isn't neccessarily shimmed, AFAIK, but if it's in the first area it is. I clear my exe from both areas whenever a crash causes the shim to be applied.)

in reply to Can the new Win7 AppCompat shims be disabled per exe?

blogs.msdn: Possible to comment via Firefox? [blogs.msdn: Possible to comment via Firefox?]

LeoDavidson — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:54:13 GMT

Ever since blogs.msdn switched to using those three-digit captchas (which seem like a good idea from all the spam there was before) I've been unable to post comments on MSDN blogs using Firefox.

Clicking the submit button just takes me back to the front page for the blog I'm reading. (No error message and no "your comment is awaiting moderation" type msg; it just navigates up a level and the comment doesn't appear.) Switching to IE lets me post the same thing without a problem.

Anyone know if there's a fix I can apply? Maybe a Firefox setting I need to change. Do other Firefox users see the same thing?

I have Firefox configured not to save cookies after the browser is closed (i.e. session cookies only) but I have msdn.com whitelisted. Can't think of anything else that might break the comment form.

in reply to blogs.msdn: Possible to comment via Firefox?

Flexible OLED vs Hammer [Flexible OLED vs Hammer]

LeoDavidson — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:14:45 GMT

CLOMP! CLOMP! CLOMP!!!

Impressive technology, and now I really want to smash loads of stuff with a hammer. Gee, that looks like fun!

in reply to Flexible OLED vs Hammer

Snow Leopard: Use guest account, lose your account's data [Snow Leopard: Use guest account, lose your account's data]

LeoDavidson — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:55:02 GMT

Niiiiice: http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/10/11/major-bug-in-snow-leopard-deletes-all-user-data

in reply to Snow Leopard: Use guest account, lose your account's data

Way to detect DWM open/close window animations? [Way to detect DWM open/close window animations?]

LeoDavidson — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:16:30 GMT

On Windows 7, I'm trying to write something which overlays a top-level layered window above my app's main window to create some visual effects. The intention is to make it look like everything is part of the main window even though there's really another window above it rendering some of the effects.

It goes wrong if the main window is opening / closing / minimizing / etc. because of the DWM's animations. The top-level effects window is positioned so that it's on top of where GetWindowRect reports the main window to be, but the on-screen representation of the main window isn't really there. The main window is being transformed & animated in 3D space away from or towards the reported window location. So my top-level effects window is sitting in space looking really weird and drawing its effects over other windows. :)

I'd be happy to simply disable my effect while the DWM animations are playing. Problem is I can't see a way to detect them. I'd like to do it properly in case future OS versions make the animations longer or shorter. i.e. I'd prefer not to use a kludge that says "don't apply my effects if the window was only opened/restored/maximized 1 second ago."

(I don't want to turn off the DWM animations for the main window.)

There are a bunch of stats returned by DwmGetCompositionTimingInfo but I'm not sure if any of them are useful for detecting the animations. It's not very clear to me what the stats are for but I'm guessing it's to do with syncing multimedia or measuring performance rather than seeing what's going on with a particular window.

There's also some DWM APIs like DwmFlush, DwmAttachMilContent, DwmGetGraphicsStreamTransformHint, DwmGetGraphicsStreamClient which (despite dating back to Vista) still seem to be undocumented (beyond their argument/return types). Is there some fuller documentation for the DWM API somewhere that I'm missing?

in reply to Way to detect DWM open/close window animations?

Are C++ debug builds faster in x64? [Are C++ debug builds faster in x64?]

LeoDavidson — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:02:21 GMT

Working on a C++ app that I also use regularly, I've noticed that my debug builds seem to run really quickly now that I'm running x64 versions. i.e. There's much less slowdown with debug vs release than there was on x86.

I wonder if that's a real effect of x64 itself -- e.g. due to x64 compiler/asm differences -- or just something I'm imagining or the side-effect of my system having more available RAM or something?

I used to hate using a debug build but now I'm happy to use it all the time.

Whatever's behind it, I like it!

in reply to Are C++ debug builds faster in x64?

How do you make desktop composition work in Win7 RDP? [How do you make desktop composition work in Win7 RDP?]

LeoDavidson — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:38:05 GMT

Now that I've got two Windows 7 machines on my LAN I thought I'd be able to use desktop composition again with Remote Desktop.

It's enabled on the Experience tab (as is everything else but Desktop Background), and it used to work fine from Vista to Vista, but it doesn't happen from 7 to 7.

Both machines are Win 7 RTM Pro. LAN speed is about 50mbit.

Does it work for anyone else?

On the subject of RDP, is there a way to reduce or remove the 30 sec timeout that you have to sit through if you kick another user off the machine you connect to? When I want to log into my HTPC from upstairs I have to wait for the TV account to be kicked off. (And then I have to reboot the HTPC when I'm done so that the TV account is automatically logged back on and the screen -- i.e. the TV -- is left unlocked. I'm used to that, though; it's having to wait 30 secs to do anything at the start that is more annoying.)

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Win7 Media Center ignores recordings (edit: but I still love it) [Win7 Media Center ignores recordings (edit: but I still love it)]

LeoDavidson — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 20:16:57 GMT

Is it just me?

I've got Windows 7 Media Center set up to record a couple of series and it just flat-out ignores them. Maybe it displays an error message when the show comes on -- I don't know -- but when I come back to the machine there is no indication that it was unable or unwilling to record an episode. It just hasn't been recorded.

(Edit: Removed a couple of silly statements that were due to me being drunk and annoyed that I couldn't watch the TV shows I'd scheduled. :))

in reply to Win7 Media Center ignores recordings (edit: but I still love it)

Free Halo 3 ODST premium 360 theme today [Free Halo 3 ODST premium 360 theme today]

LeoDavidson — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:33:25 GMT

Just a theme, but it's a "premium" one and it's free. I've never had a premium theme before as I don't think they're worth paying for, so there's the novelty factor for me. :)

Link for anyone else who wants it:

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-GB/games/offers/033f0002-0000-4000-8000-00004d530877?cid=SLink

(If you're not at your 360 you can login on the website and "purchase" it for free today, then download it whenever at your convenience. I really like that aspect of the Xbox Live website.)

in reply to Free Halo 3 ODST premium 360 theme today

Free game today only: Tales of Money Island ep 1 [Free game today only: Tales of Money Island ep 1]

LeoDavidson — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 05:17:50 GMT

1st of the new Monkey Island game episodes is free if you download it today:

http://www.telltalegames.com/playlikeapirate

in reply to Free game today only: Tales of Money Island ep 1

Gamasutra: Dirty Coding Tricks [Gamasutra: Dirty Coding Tricks]

LeoDavidson — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 02:00:34 GMT

Article about the kludges people resorted to to get games to ship on time:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tricks.php

The comments are also worth reading for gems like this:

Back on Wing Commander 1 we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We'd clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like "EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah." We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read "Thank you for playing Wing Commander."

in reply to Gamasutra: Dirty Coding Tricks

Win 7 file backup is sloooooow [Win 7 file backup is sloooooow]

LeoDavidson — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:06:05 GMT

The disk-image backup stuff in Win 7 seems speedy but the file-based backup... my god it is slow.

I guess it won't matter once the first backup is done (as the rest will only process the changed files) but I find it ridiculous that it's been going for over 12 hours now and isn't even at 50%, backing up less than 700MB of data.

I manually backuped up exactly the same data (and then some) to the same type of HDD two days ago and it only took a few hours to do.

With the backup tool, even when the PC is idle, it's not using much of the CPU (both cores sitting around 10% most of the time) and the HDD is far from 100% active either. It seems like neither CPU nor HDD is the bottleneck, and there's no network activity involved, so it seems to be throttled for some reason. I can dig throttling the backup when the computer is in use, so you can't tell it's going on, but I was in bed for long enough for the whole thing to be done.

When backing up files on D:\ to E:\, it appears to be copying all the files into zips in a staging area on C:\ first which, given hundreds of gig free on E:\, is a good way to ensure that twice as much data is copied as needed (but even when it's doing that, the disk is idle a lot of the time).

A quick search found two other people complaining about the same thing.

...Haha, talk about timing. As I wrote this the backup completed (at "50%" ?!?!). So I'm glad that's over but still wondering why it took 12 hours on a mostly-idle machine. o.O

On the plus side, it is good that we can specify which files & folders are backed up again, unlike the backup tool in Vista Ultimate. If there was more control over (or maybe just visibilty of, since the not knowing is the biggest problem) how long each incremental backup was kept then I'd probably use this for good instead of just as a stop-gap until Ghost is updated for Win7. The built-in backup tool is getting close but it's not quite there yet.

Edit: Just checked that doing another backup on top of the old one only took a few minutes, so that's all good. It's a one-off pain, I guess, so long as you know not to ever use this tool to do an ad-hoc backup to a USB drive that you want to then send away later the same day, because it ain't gonna be ready in time.

in reply to Win 7 file backup is sloooooow

Win 7: Action Center notification icon [Win 7: Action Center notification icon]

LeoDavidson — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 05:45:46 GMT

Windows 7 has added the Action Center notification icon which collects maintenance messages and seems like a good idea.

It seems to have some problems, though:

1) The icon doesn't seem to change to indicate there are new messages.

2) By default, the icon is always shown on the taskbar, whether or not there are any new messages.

3) If the icon is moved into the notification-icon pop-up ("Only show notifications") it stays in there even when a new message arrives.

Are we supposed to hover/click on it every so often to see if anything is new or am I missing something? Maybe the icon only changes after a little while and I just haven't waited long enough while there are pending messages?

It'd be better if it indicated a pending message so we knew when to click and when to ignore it.

It'd also be better if it was hidden (in the pop-up) when the message list was empty, and only appeared on the taskbar when there was a message. Not doing that seems contrary to the idea of tidying up the notification area in Windows 7 on top of the fact that the current design provides no passive way to tell that there are new alerts.

(I have been archiving each message that arrives, to remove it from the list, whenever I notice one. So when I talk about "new messages" you could substitute "any messages" and it'd still reflect what I'm seeing.)

in reply to Win 7: Action Center notification icon

VMware: stop its services running when not needed [VMware: stop its services running when not needed]

LeoDavidson — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 03:07:49 GMT

I figure the audience here, being interested in testing OS versions etc., might include a few VMware users. If you're one then this thing I threw together today might interest you:

http://www.pretentiousname.com/vmware_launcher/index.html

It's a script & instructions that let you set all the VMware background services to manual startup and then only start them when you're actually using VMware and shut them down when you're finished. Everything's done automatically (once set up; you just launch the script instead of VMware itself and it takes care of the rest).

With Windows 7's nice boot times I've been looking at ways of keeping my boot fast. VMware's four auto-start services (three of which are completely unncesssary with my setup, the other of which is badly written and constantly polls instead of waiting on a change event, and there's also a trayicon app which polls an ini file 24/7 even if you disable the tray icon) seemed like they needed gunishment. :)

(They've also been known to start using signficant CPU on some machines, though the main irritation for me was just the fact they were there and spamming Process Monitor for no valid reason, and adding to the boot-time HDD thrashing.)

in reply to VMware: stop its services running when not needed

Win7: Way to add custom menus to the start menu? [Win7: Way to add custom menus to the start menu?]

LeoDavidson — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 02:54:16 GMT

In Windows 7, I wish you could put custom libraries (or any other menu of shortcuts) on the start menu, either pinned to the top-left part or on the right-hand side under the user logo.

You can put some of the pre-defined libraries (Music, Documents, etc.) on the right side but I cannot find a way to create my own library and put it there.

I'm trying to ween myself off the old docked toolbar I used to have across the top of my screen, covered in buttons and menus for launching stuff. I want to just use the new taskbar (which is great for apps you use almost all the time but rubbish for apps you use a lot but not all the time) and the start menu, but it's lacking...

If I could get some kind of categorised menus -- about 3 or 4 of them would do it -- directly on the start menu somewhere then I'd be set. Unfortunately I can't see a good way to do it, other than by abusing and renaming the pre-defined Libraries (which will cause problems because programs will e.g. use Music as a default save location for music files and turnign that into Deveploment Tools would go badly wrong).

I found a tool that could create custom jump lists and the result is alllllmost perfect... Problem is, only that tiny arrow on the right opens the sub-menu. If I click the main part of it it launches the app which creates the jump-list. Not sure if there is a good way around that limitation...

Starting to think I'll have to go back to my old launching toolbar that I've been using since XP. Sigh. So close yet so far. I wish MS did a better job of allowing customisation outside of a very narrow range of presets. How come we can't pin any library to the right of the start menu, instead of just the ones that come with windows? Or is there some way to modify that list?

in reply to Win7: Way to add custom menus to the start menu?

Is there a text editor which supports UAC? [Is there a text editor which supports UAC?]

LeoDavidson — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 14:06:10 GMT

Does anyone know of a good text editor which supports UAC?

That is, one which would allow me to edit files which require admin rights to modify and will display a UAC prompt when I try to save them.

Right now I have to specially launch the editor as admin up-front instead of opening the files normally and dealing with the admin issue when & if I save the files.

in reply to Is there a text editor which supports UAC?

Check OS version or features: Which is it? [Check OS version or features: Which is it?]

LeoDavidson — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 03:38:45 GMT

There's conflicting advice coming out of MS on how to write code which can use newer Windows features if available without requiring the latest version of the OS.

Some say you should check for features (e.g. using LoadLibrary & GetProcAddress) instead of checking the OS version explicitly. I've seen this said a number of times by different people (and tend to do it myself), but here's one recent example:

Version Checking (Just Don’t Do It) -- Windows 7 Blog for Developers:

As mentioned previously, checking the operating system version is not the best way to confirm that a specific operating system feature is available. This is because the operating system may have had new features added in a redistributable DLL.

Use LoadLibrary() to load a library which is not yet loaded into your application. If you are interested in a new function of a DLL which is already loaded (for example, kernel32.dll), then call GetModuleHandle() to obtain the module handle. If either of these functions return NULL, then this indicates an error.

Use GetProcAddress() to obtain a function pointer. If GetProcAddress() returns NULL, then the function may not exist. Cast the pointer to a function pointer of an appropriate prototype. Some functions, although they exist may actually be stubs that return a "not implemented" error. Be such to check for such errors.

Yet if you look at the MSDN documentation on LoadLibrary it explicitly tells you not to check for features, and to check the OS verison instead, for security reasons:

Do not make assumptions about the operating system version based on a LoadLibrary call that searches for a DLL. If the application is running in an environment where the DLL is legitimately not present but a malicious version of the DLL is in the search path, the malicious version of the DLL may be loaded. Instead, use the recommended techniques described in Getting the System Version.

Which is right? :-)

Or is the real point that DLLs should be loaded using their full paths after obtaining the "system" path? If so it'd be helpful if that was stated explicitly in all cases. (I don't think I've ever seen sample code which loads a system DLL by full path, FWIW. The sample code in the first linked article doesn't, although it's loading kernel32.dll which is already going to be in-process and won't be searched for.)

in reply to Check OS version or features: Which is it?

Nirvana vs Rick Astley [Nirvana vs Rick Astley]

LeoDavidson — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:28:17 GMT

mind = blown:

in reply to Nirvana vs Rick Astley

Win 7 UK pre-orders available now [Win 7 UK pre-orders available now]

LeoDavidson — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:55:17 GMT

For other UK folks (who like me CBA pre-ordering the cheaper US version :)):

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windows/buy/offers/pre-order.aspx

If you're after Professional, check out the eBuyer link as they're selling it for £80, though it looks like they'll sell out of their allocation pretty soon. Amazon have it for £90 which is still £10 less than some of the other sites, I think.

For Home Premium, Amazon and eBuyer are both selling it for £45, saving you a little bit off the usual £50 price. eBuyer have already sold out of their Home Premium copies as I write this. (Maybe they'll get more allocated, though?)

Just bought 2x Pro and 1x Home Premium. I wasn't going to update my laptop, keeping it as a Vista machine for testing, but sod it; I want the shiny shiny on all my computers. :)

in reply to Win 7 UK pre-orders available now

UK Win7 pre-order page is b0rked [UK Win7 pre-order page is b0rked]

LeoDavidson — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:08:00 GMT

The UK version of the Windows 7 pre-order site seems to be b0rked. It's linked from the US version if you change the Country under the Participating retailers heading (not via the top-right of the page) but it seems like an unfinished page or something:

The URL has "uk" in it, and the top-right of the page says "United Kingdom", and it's got the "E" versions of the OS. So it's not just showing the US page again. However, in both Firefox and IE8:

The country indicator next to the Win7 boxes pictures says "United States"
Clicking the "change" link beside that puts the drop-down on top of the country indicator instead of below it
The list of participating retailers is empty (and missing its heading)
The two box photos have different shadows, and one of them is on a white background while the other seems to have a transparent background (which makes me think the page is simply unfinished)

Was this just linked by mistake? Is there a UK pre-order offer (yet)?

in reply to UK Win7 pre-order page is b0rked

Remote Desktop battery monitor [Remote Desktop battery monitor]

LeoDavidson — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:23:32 GMT

I often use Remote Desktop to access my main desktop PC from my laptop.

RDP works great but one thing that bugs me is that when it's full-screen I can no longer see the laptop's battery meter in the taskbar status area.

I'm thinking about writing a little tool to put a copy of the meter for the laptop (RDP client) into the taskbar of the desktop (RDP server) while connected to it.

Anyone know if such a thing already exists, or have any suggestions on the best way to transmit the battery info and/or make it run on the desktop only while the laptop is RDP'd into it? Seems like something that could be done in a number of ways with various trade-offs.

Anyone else interested in such a thing or is it just me? :) If I write one it'll be free.

in reply to Remote Desktop battery monitor