Entries for TimP

SP1 hosed my system [SP1 hosed my system]

TimP — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:15:35 GMT

I just went through Windows Update to get SP1. The Windows portion ran fine, I clicked "Restart Now", it went through two more shutdown parts, then rebooted. So far so good. Next it goes to the black screen with white text where I assume it is verifying files or something.

I get to:

!! 0xc0190002 !! 2340/123123 (cabview.dll)

and it hangs. According to the NTSTATUS page on MSDN, that error code is "STATUS_INVALID_TRANSACTION" which means "The transaction handle associated with this operation is invalid."

Google yields three results, two of which are in German. I figured after XP SP2 deployments went relatively well and since the SP1 RC had been out so long there was nothing to worry about. I guess I learned my lesson. For what it's worth, this is with Vista Ultimate x64. Maybe Google will pick this up and someone will have an answer.

The icing on the cake is that I don't have my Vista disc with me and won't be able to get it until this weekend. Does anyone know if you can do a system restore after booting off the disc? It created a restore point before installing and I figure that's my best chance of getting back to normal without having to reinstall Vista.

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Rootkits on x64 Vista: Are they feasible? [Rootkits on x64 Vista: Are they feasible?]

TimP — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:36:24 GMT

I've noticed my desktop icons seem to be refreshing a lot more than I remember in the past and any suspicious behavior always triggers paranoid malware fears in my mind, but that's beside the point. I was thinking about the rootkit "epidemic" and was wondering if they're still a legitimate risk on x64 Vista.

As far as I understand, rootkits that effectively hide their presence (i.e. not showing up in the process list, registry, file system, etc.) require a kernel mode component to intercept queries for information that could reveal them and return a modified result with themselves omitted.

With x64 Vista closing the door on unsigned kernel drivers, is it still possible to have a truly stealthy rootkit (obviously moot if the rootkit is a signed)?

Have there been any stories of Vista rootkits in the wild?

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Looking for x86 assembly books (with a twist) [Looking for x86 assembly books (with a twist)]

TimP — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 06:59:39 GMT

I'm working my way through a computer science degree and despite being exposed to assembly programming, courses tend to focus on RISC architectures like MIPS. While the general ideas of assembly programming are similar across all architectures, the PC market is mostly x86 and I find myself lost in the adx, eax, ebx, movl, etc. soup.

The twist (if you want to call it that) is that I'm not a hardcore assembly nut who thinks that "performance means using assembly" and I avoid assembly programming when I can move up the abstraction chain without significant consequences. However, reading things like Raymond Chen's blog, Understanding the Liunx Kernel, and Windows Internals makes me wish I could follow x86 better.

So with that in mind, I'm looking for a book that explains the x86 assembly language as well as the x86 architecture in general. A list of all the instructions and what they do is not what I'm looking for. I'm curious about the whole architecture from areas such as booting to disk and other device access. I'd also prefer something that's readable as opposed to a link to the Intel or AMD hardware reference manuals. Something reasonably current would be nice. It doesn't have to cover x64 extensions, but I definitely want coverage of i386/32-bit.

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Guitar Hero III for PC not playing nicely with power saving on Vista [Guitar Hero III for PC not playing nicely with power saving on Vista]

TimP — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 02:15:35 GMT

I recently purchased Guitar Hero III for PC and while the game itself is fun and runs fine, the software in general is not very respectful to my settings.

My biggest gripe is that it seemingly disables monitor sleep mode. I have my monitor sleep after five minutes and I can see the importance of disabling that for the duration of the game, but after I exit my monitor doesn't sleep anymore, what's worse is that even after reboots it still doesn't sleep. I checked the power management control panel and all my settings are intact, so GH3 is doing something more sneaky.

A lesser, superficial gripe is that it disables cursor shadows after every exit, but at least I can fix that myself.

To add insult to injury, GH3 complains that its "security software" cannot load and the game terminates if I try to run Sysinternals Process Monitor to see what it's sticking its hands into.

To get back to the primary concern though, does anyone know what the game could be doing to break my power saving settings like this and if there's a way to fix it?

Thanks!

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Concering "system integrity" error (0xC004D401) [Concering "system integrity" error (0xC004D401)]

TimP — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:21:29 GMT

Logged in over remote desktop, I just saw this error. Obviously it's slightly concerning to see that an "unauthorized change was made to Windows" since this error message showed up while the computer was in a screensaver.

Some event log digging yielded this:

Code integrity determined that the image hash of a file is not valid. The file could be corrupt due to unauthorized modification or the invalid hash could indicate a potential disk device error.

File Name: \Device\HarddiskVolume1\Windows\System32\l3codeca.acm

Running Vista Ultimate x64. Can someone MD5 that file and tell me what they get?

My results:

c:\Windows\System32>md5sum l3codeca.acm
3bb9e6aec59f77f5ea935591bef18c5e *l3codeca.acm

c:\Windows\System32>sha1sum l3codeca.acm
59c873741391cb4abf7783b3de119f11a42192c0 *l3codeca.acm

I haven't installed anything in weeks either. Slightly annoyed and concerned. :( I initially couldn't access the control panel either. I rebooted and didn't see any follow-up errors and the control panel worked again.

I would be very appreciative if someone could shed some light on what's happening. I see that some programs apparently trigger this, but I don't have any of the listed culprits.

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Where are BSOD logs on Vista? [Where are BSOD logs on Vista?]

TimP — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:52:15 GMT

Anyone know where Vista keeps its BSOD logs? I just had a very arbitrary BSOD and the only part of the message I saw was that it had to do with ntfs.sys. I got a kernel memory dump in C:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP, but I remember XP used to provide a report on what happened somewhere in the Windows folder. Does anyone know where that went? The Event Log is useless in this case (Your computer has unexpectedly shutdown... No sh*t).

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Mono adds FastCGI support [Mono adds FastCGI support]

TimP — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:10:41 GMT

Just saw this on Miguel's blog and thought it was pretty cool.

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Oct-30.html

The xsp stand-alone server always seemed like a stop gap solution for running ASP.NET applications on Linux since it required you to run two web servers and proxy requests for any sort of meaningful website.

With FastCGI support, you can run it with just about any web server (lighttpd, nginx, Apache sans mod_mono)

You can even (in theory) run Mono on IIS now. [H]

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Getting started with functional programming? [Getting started with functional programming?]

TimP — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 22:44:21 GMT

I've been watching a lot of the JAOO videos (the most C9 I've watched in a long time) and it's sparked some curiosity in functional programming languages. I was wondering if anyone had any good references with examples for learning functional programming basics. Ideally something easy to read that doesn't look like it came from a college math book would be nice. I'm also interested in the language agnostic background like further explanations of lambda, closures, etc. in terms that don't involve a plethora of Greek letters and subscripts.

I'm interested in a traditional functional programming language. Any recommendations? Haskell seems to be on the receiving end of all jokes, but some popular ones I've seen thrown around are Common Lisp, Scheme, and OCaml.

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Re: Apple should sell Windows PCs? [Apple should sell Windows PCs?]

TimP — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 16:13:18 GMT

They're never going to pre-load Windows on their machines (unless they stop development of OS X at some point, highly unlikely), but with Boot Camp, they've done all the work except for getting a copy of Windows.

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Preserving file create date? [Preserving file create date?]

TimP — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 19:59:44 GMT

To start off, I admit I'm a little compulsive about file timestamps.

I have a second drive in my computer that I want to repartition and reformat. It currently has all my audio/video/pictures and I want to keep all the timestamps intact. The closest I've come is with using 7zip. It preserves modification date, but when it's extracted the creation date is lost. I realize that resetting the creation date is "correct" behavior on a new file system, but is there any way I can save this data so everything looks exactly the same when I copy the data back?

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Whiteboard coding interviews are bad [Whiteboard coding interviews are bad]

TimP — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 20:21:49 GMT

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Sep-05-2.html

Miguel brought that point up in a post talking about Novell/Mono hiring process. I never understood the fascination myself with these sorts of interviews or why they exist since they hardly relate to professional software development. To me it seems like a lot of companies do them because Microsoft is sort of infamous for doing them, implying it's a good way to screen people.

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What's the deal with the "people" subicon on Vista? [What's the deal with the "people" subicon on Vista?]

TimP — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 21:59:03 GMT

Anyone else seen this on their files?

http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/9081/peoplece6.png

I notice it happens when I download files through Cygwin wget and a few other programs that run through Cygwin.

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Vista BitLocker + Full System Backup and Restore [Vista BitLocker + Full System Backup and Restore]

TimP — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 22:34:22 GMT

I'm planning on building a new Vista system later this month and I've been getting up to speed on how I'm going to set it all up. I'm interested in using BitLocker and a USB stick for full drive encryption and also using the new full system backup and restore.

Are there any gotchas when using the two together? Does the full system backup just dump the encrypted data to the backup media or is it decrypted (bad)? Is there any extra pain in restoring an encrypted full system backup other than having to restore two partitions instead of one?

And here's a bonus question. I saw some old articles from last spring about Virtual PC Express and being able to install up to 4 copies of Vista Enterprise in a virtual machine. Does that apply to Ultimate too, if it is officially a superset of Enterprise or is it strictly a licensing difference?

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MSDNAA Vista Business to Ultimate upgrade - is it possible? [MSDNAA Vista Business to Ultimate upgrade - is it possible?]

TimP — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 20:44:28 GMT

I have a copy of Vista Business that I got through MSDNAA and I'm going to install on a new computer next month. I'd like to have the media center functionality, which Business lacks. I also need remote desktop, which leaves Ultimate as the only option. Is it possible to "Any time upgrade" the copy of Business to Ultimate at a reasonable price?

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Passive mode FTP with ftp.exe? [Passive mode FTP with ftp.exe?]

TimP — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 18:55:05 GMT

Is it possible to use passive mode FTP with Geometry Wars for Windows came out about a week ago. I've been playing the Grid Wars clone for a while but was anticipating buying the official Geometry Wars when it came out. As I checked the MSN Games website, I noticed that it's a "Vista exclusive", apparently for no reason other than to try to spur Vista sales. I already have Vista through MSDNAA, but based on what I've seen I'm not willing to upgrade for at least another three months or so.

Since Geometry Wars doesn't use DX10 or any other Vista exclusive features, has anyone tried installing it on XP? I would buy it in a heartbeat if it can be installed on XP, but I'm slightly annoyed that it's a Vista exclusive for marketing bullsh*t reasons.

in reply to Geometry Wars for Windows XP?

Does cmd.exe support rc files? [Does cmd.exe support rc files?]

TimP — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 19:57:44 GMT

Is there a cmd.exe equivalent for something like .bashrc? I want to set and change a few environment variables every time I start a shell. I can't make permanent changes to the environment variables due to the way the computer is setup.

The only way I can think of doing it is pretty ugly. A batch file like this:

set MYVAR=abc
cmd

The problem is I'd have to invoke the shell with this batch file every time.

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VMware and Microsoft butting heads [VMware and Microsoft butting heads]

TimP — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:44:35 GMT

Not sure if this was already posted, if so I didn't see it.

VMware seems to be getting pretty vocal about their dissatisfaction with the way virtualization is heading in the Vista era.

I really like VMware's products, but I can't say the same thing about the company. Right now they're essentially demanding that Microsoft play nice and let them compete with their products. On the contrary, from VMware press releases, bloggers, and even employees I've met they seem to have a anti-competitive mindset. Essentially, it's a "anything we make is ours and only ours and you can't do it" policy. I would bet that the opening of VMware Player, VMware Server, and the VMDK spec would have never happened if Microsoft hadn't started pressuring them with Virtual PC and Virtual Server.

Personally, I think their attacks are out of fear. They have all their eggs in the virtualization basket (VMware that is, not their parent EMC) and if they start losing marketshare their company will dry up.

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Annoying errors with the VC++ 2005 compiler [Annoying errors with the VC++ 2005 compiler]

TimP — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 01:46:03 GMT

I have a small ~200 line C program that I wrote on Linux with the goal of running on Windows and Linux when I was done. The program compiles fine without a single warning on gcc, but when I setup a VC++ 2005 project, it threw up 61 errors. I'm only using functions in the standard C library and an open source library that is compatible with Linux and Windows, in other words, no platform specific code.

I'm not intimately familiar with C, but I heard that in "classic C" it expects all the variables to be declared at the top and it looks like thats what a lot of the errors pertain to (complaining about undeclared variables that are clearly declared). Is there any way to get VC++ to compile this without having to rewrite a significant portion of the program? I'm thinking along the lines of compiler options.

One specific error:
error C2065: 'iniconf' : undeclared identifier

Line of code the error refers to:
int iniconf = file_exists("settings.ini");

(file_exists is my own function in the same source code file with an appropriate function prototype)

Thanks!

in reply to Annoying errors with the VC++ 2005 compiler

"Object oriented" craze of the 1990s ["Object oriented" craze of the 1990s]

TimP — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 01:52:06 GMT

One thing that's been bugging me for a while is whenever I read about any new technology from the early to mid 1990s, the words "object oriented" inevitably come up and I was wondering if anyone knew why. The only context of "object oriented" I'm familiar with is how it relates to programming.

For example:
The .NET Base Class Library is object oriented.

After W3bbo's post about the Newton, I was reading the Wikipedia article and saw this:

"For most of its design lifecycle Newton had a large-format screen, more internal memory, and a rich object-oriented graphics kernel."

What is an "object-oriented graphics kernel"? A kernel programmed in an object oriented language? A kernel with object-oriented bindings? I'm not even going to speculate on the "graphics" part except for guessing that the graphics were integrated into the kernel, similar to how Windows has some portions of the graphics-related code in the kernel.

OS/2 is another offender.

"On top of this lies the Workplace Shell (WPS) introduced in OS/2 2.0. WPS is an object-oriented shell allowing the user to perform traditional computing tasks such as accessing files, printers, launching legacy programs, and advanced object oriented tasks using built-in and 3rd party application objects that extended the shell in an integrated fashion not available on any other mainstream operating system."

An "object-oriented shell" which provides for "advanced object-oriented tasks"? Huh? Normally you see a lot of buzz words and fluff in product announcements, but since Wikipedia isn't trying to sell Apple Newtons or copies of OS/2, I'm surprised at their word choice.

The next step was to check the object oriented article itself on Wikipedia. The definition was vague.

"Collaboration between objects involves them sending messages to each other."

Does that make the Win32 API object oriented since it uses message passing, even though it's mostly C, a non-object oriented language?

Does putting a pineapple object in a cart object mean I'm doing advanced object oriented grocery shopping?

I can only guess this is a marketing buzzword, not unlike AJAX and Web 2.0 today. I can't remember the last time I saw any software being sold on its object orientedness.

Any clarification is appreciated. :)

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Cisco Clean Access / McAfee VirusScan Enterprise crashing IE7 [Cisco Clean Access / McAfee VirusScan Enterprise crashing IE7]

TimP — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 22:55:11 GMT

As part of a network policy, I had to install Cisco Clean Access and McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8 on my machine. After having horrific IE7 crashes immediately after install, things seem to have calmed down. One issue I have now though is when multiple tabs are loading simultaneously, IE7 will just close - no error, crash dialog, nothing in the Event Log. My common links folder has 7 links and when I open them all up it's a surefire way to crash (close) IE. I also had two home pages and that would sometimes crash it too. I initially thought that it was a particular page crashing it, but when I opened them all individually it worked. This lead me to think that it was some kind of connection throttling "helper" with McAfee, but I opened a folder group in Firefox 1.5 with more tabs and had no issues.

I was slightly irritated having to install these apps in the first place and this definitely isn't helping. If there's no solution I'll probably just uninstall McAfee and Clean Access, then do a System Restore to yesterday evening and setup another machine so I don't have to pollute this one (my primary).

I would very much appreciate any help.

Thanks!

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Windows Live Writer and metaWeblog API Rant [Windows Live Writer and metaWeblog API Rant]

TimP — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:32:28 GMT

I've spent a handful of frustrating hours writing an XML RPC server to implement the metaWeblog API so I can post on my own blog engine from Windows Live Writer. The problem is, despite metaWeblog being a "standard", it really isn't. The official spec, the MSDN docs, and what Windows Live Writer actually implements have some pretty big differences.

Let's take the metaWeblog.getCategories function, for example. The official spec says:
"The struct returned contains one struct for each category, containing the following elements: description, htmlUrl and rssUrl."

A struct or structs? It appears that they actually meant an array of structs, so I returned an array of structs with description, htmlUrl, and rssUrl elements.

I test it with Windows Live Writer and it's broken. Time to check out MSDN. They say it should return:

"An array of structs that contains one struct for each category. Each category struct contains a description field that contains the name of the category.

struct {
string description;
}"

Ok, so I get rid of the htmlUrl and rssUrl elements and try again. Still broken. I happen upon an article online and it turns out that Windows Live Writer expects an array of structs with description, categoryid, and title. No where in the Windows Live Writer documentation or on the website does it say that.

I have category support working, but that's it. I've tried various combinations of the official spec, the MSDN spec, trying to reverse engineer the Windows Live Spaces RPC server, but I've still had no success on getting the rest of the API working.

To be honest, all I want is to be able to use this with Windows Live Writer, so can someone from the dev team please post a spec of what responses Windows Live Writer expects so it's not a guessing game?

in reply to Windows Live Writer and metaWeblog API Rant

Where are the string functions in C? [Where are the string functions in C?]

TimP — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 18:54:07 GMT

I wrote a neat little script the other day that runs under the PHP command line interpreter. Since I had some thoughts on releasing it, I figured I'd rewrite it in C since the program that it's used with is written in C and not many people have the PHP interpreter installed. One thing the program does is replaces a form feed ASCII character (12) with a blank character. In PHP this is trivial with str_replace(chr(12), "", $str). I dug through the string.h functions and there was no string replace in sight. I did some searching on Google and all I found were functions that seemed hacked together and had no guarantee of their security or robustness. After some thinking I realized that the character I needed to replace was always the first character so a simple substring would do the trick. Dug through string.h again and again I came up empty.

I have to imagine that doing string replace and substring operations are fairly common, even for C programmers. Is there a hidden string header that I'm not aware of or do C programmers re-invent the wheel everytime this has to be done? I did find some 3rd party string libraries, but I'd prefer something that's included in the standard C library.

For the record, I wrote a terribly hackish solution that copies the bytes from the string character array to a new array starting at index 1 so the first character is excluded.

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FileSystemWatcher for opening files? [FileSystemWatcher for opening files?]

TimP — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 19:19:43 GMT

Is there any way to be notified when files are opened by a user? Something like the FileSystemWatcher class, except with an "Opened" event. I just need the file name of the file that's opened.

For example, User double clicks on "myfile.txt" on the Desktop and Notepad is launched. I need some way to be notified that C:\Documents and Settings\User\Desktop\myfile.txt has been opened.

Thanks!

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