I got fed up with the mess of time zones on Channel 9's forums, and wrote a C# wrapper class for the registry time zone information and some useful Win32 APIs for converting times between UTC.
As a test application and hopefully something useful, I also wrote a World Clock application. It's basic but I hope functional.
Now I just hope I got the conversion code right!
CodeProject article (may move if it gets edited)
There are a number of persistent claims that the recorded results for the US presidential election don't actually match the voters' intentions.
What's worrying me is the number of people (look at the comments) talking about optical scanning machines. Sorry, but an optical scanning machine is just as open to fraud by its manufacturer or operators as a touch-screen voting machine. The counting needs to be as observable as the casting of the ballots. I can't see any way that a counting machine can be certified honest, on every day of the year, without actually checking the totals before and after scanning and confirming that the correct numbers are indicated, on the actual day of the election and for every ballot.
You'll note that this amounts to hand-counting. Why not get rid of the expensive, corruptable machinery, in that case? Use hand-counting alone. As I said last time, it doesn't actually take that long. What's more, the actual counting can be observed - the correct assignation of ballots to candidates can be verified, the correct number of ballots in a pile can be checked (normally ballots are placed in piles of 100 during a UK count), and the number of piles and the remainder can be easily counted. Also, the acceptance or otherwise of a voter's mark can be contested.
If you trust the machinery to give you not only the individual totals, but also the total number of papers counted, you have no true paper trail. You can only verify the results by counting the votes.
I've also seen the Open Voting Consortium site. They propose a touch-screen system which produces a paper ballot which can then be machine counted. The touch-screen system does not produce totals, it merely prints a paper ballot with the choices.
Unfortunately it suffers from an even greater flaw than optical-scan - it uses barcodes for the machine counting. There is absolutely no guarantee that the barcode actually contains the choices indicated on the human-readable face of the ballot. There's no guarantee that the barcode reader reports the correct information. There's no guarantee that the totalling machine records the right numbers.
In addition, there's way too much software and hardware to go wrong. Any time a UPS is brought into the discussion, you have to cringe.
My Dad (a 34-year computing industry veteran) pointed out something obvious with even Open Source voting software. There's no guarantee that the code running on the system is in fact compiled from the provided source. There's also no guarantee, as some have already pointed out, that the tools used to compile the source have not been subverted. The only way you could trust a compiled binary is to validate the object code. I've unpicked compiled code and believe me, that's not fun. I'm not sure I trust the security credentials of any organisation that states:
"The companies that produce voting machines have poured gasoline onto the smoldering embers of concern. Some of these products are built on Microsoft operating systems - operating systems that have a well earned reputation for being penetrable and insecure."
Yup, it's a bunch of ABMers.
I've been reading up on the US presidential election. For better or worse, we (the UK) are now in Iraq and would find it difficult to leave, for humanitarian reasons. For that among many other reasons, it would be good to have a US government we (the people) could get along with. Just a note for Bush supporters - Bush is not well-liked in the world. We generally do not want to see him elected. Under his presidency the world's opinion has shifted against the US. According to the PIPA poll, a majority of Bush supporters believe that the world support or are indifferent to the Iraq war, and a majority believe that people in the world would like to see Bush elected. It's not true.
But anyway, this article is about inappropriate use of technology. I'm not going to claim I know about a US election - I've only visited the US once, about a month ago (must write that trip report). From what I've seen through my browsing, it seems as though every locality has its own rules, and a combination of technical means for automated vote counting. We all know about the 'hanging chads' of the 2000 election, where punched cards were used to indicate the candidate voted for. I understand some locations have mechanical 'voting machines' where the voter sets levers according to the candidates they want to vote for, then pulls a big lever to increment the totals. Other places use optical mark readers, where the voter fills in a bubble or completes an arrow (JPEG, 1.6MB - seen on This Is Broken, note that the counting machine only counts the arrow even though the presidential arrows are misplaced!) It seems very few places do it the British way, and you have to vote in all elections at the same time with a whacking great ballot paper.
The British way is very different. For a start, we have no elections for boards of education or drain commissioner. We simply elect a local council. I live in Reading, which is a unitary authority, so there's only one local council - no county council, and no parish council. We also have a Parliamentary System - the head of government is (by convention) the leader of the largest (group of) parties - so no election for President, only for your local MP. We hold a local government election three out of every four years (back when Berkshire County Council existed, the fourth year was the county council election) and a general election whenever the Prime Minister feels like it. There's a mandatory five-year limit on a sitting Parliament (House of Commons, in fact, there is no democratic election to the House of Lords) but a Prime Minister can call it earlier. Normally they're every four years - waiting until the last possible moment, as John Major did in 1997, is a sign of weakness (which was duly punished). All of these elections are currently first-past-the-post systems.
Finally, every four years there are European Parliament elections. These are based on much larger multi-member constituencies and have proportional representation with the D'Hondt method on party slates - you vote for a party, the party decides what order their members will be elected in (a closed list).
The tradition in Britain is that voting is performed by marking a cross on a ballot paper in the box alongside the candidate (or party for European elections) you want to vote for, you then place the paper, folded once, in the ballot box. At the close of polls, the boxes are opened under the scrutiny of officials from each party, the returning officer (responsible for declaring the result, usually the Mayor [largely a ceremonial post for most UK boroughs, although chairing full council meetings]) and local government officers. The ballots are counted by hand, traditionally by bank tellers but they're a dying breed. Votes may be recounted upon request at the discretion of the Returning Officer. If there's a tie, the result is decided by drawing lots.
This year the local election was particularly odd here, because Reading's ward boundaries had been redrawn, and therefore all seats were up for re-election. There are now 15 three-member wards and one one-member ward; I don't live there so I could vote for up to three candidates on the same ballot paper. Interestingly two of the wards split two-to-one between two parties - either some voters had mixed minds or were not aware they could vote for more than one candidate. The European election was held concurrently. The candidates are indicated by their names, their party symbols (if they choose to use one) and the full name of their party affiliation. The European ballot showed the party name primarily but also the ten or so candidates from each party - that was a long ballot paper.
Given the complicated counting required this year, the counts took place the day after the election. Well, normally each election's ballots can be formed into piles for each candidate and a pile for spoiled ballots, then the piles can be counted, as there's a maximum of one cross on each unspoiled ballot. This could be done with the European election but was complicated by the large constituencies and the vote distribution arithmetic. The locals required each ballot to be counted up to three times, not a simple task, although I think they started by dividing the votes into piles of three-Labour, three-Conservative, three-Liberal Democrat and Other, which reduces the complexity quite a bit.
The way the local election worked out, by the way, was that the candidate with most votes has greatest seniority (the seat becoming up for election in four years), then the next for election in three years, and the final one in two years.
General Election ballots can be counted pretty quickly this way; the fastest in 2001 was Sunderland South in 44 minutes. Their task was obviously simplified by the fact they were counting how large the Labour victory would be. The small parties and independents care that their votes are counted fairly accurately - it could mean that they will lose their deposit. In one of the oddities of standing for Parliament, a candidate must pay a £500 deposit. If they win 5% or more of the vote, the deposit is returned. Otherwise the government keeps it. If the intent is to reduce the number of crackpot candidates, it's a failure - by-elections (elections outside the normal polling schedule) often have 20 candidates or more.
It seems to me that the US use of technology in elections runs a much stronger risk of tampering, incorrect recording of voter intent and inability to challenge results, with the benefits being solely in the cost of running the election and minor improvements in speed of result collation.
I haven't gone looking for it. If you see a link, please report it.
Microsoft generally have a problem with leaked versions. I remember seeing leaked Windows 2000 betas (and I think even RTM) when I was at University. My suspicion is that it's not anyone at Microsoft leaking, but someone at the CD/DVD mastering houses. No evidence, just supposition.
I think you'd have to have hacked/modded your Xbox in order to play this, though, since a genuine Xbox disc is dual layer, and it's pretty expensive to obtain a dual-layer burner (if a dual-layer DVD-R would even be Xbox compatible).
Shipping Software and Broken Windows (John Lawrence, MS VS Team System blogger)
I'm afraid we have the opposite problem - if it looks great, the customers (and sometimes the management) tend to assume that all the code behind the UI is done. Having the germ of something that works is great for the coders' morale, but you get a boatload of "what do you mean it isn't done yet?"-type questions. This happens particularly if the requirements were vague and the UI's been done as a way of investigating the workflow.
One of my colleagues has seriously suggested building the UI nearly, but not quite, right, then logging a bunch of bugs against it. That seems wasteful to me - I'm of the 'do it right first time' persuasion, within the limits of your current system knowledge.
The UI/code relationship is a bit of an iceberg, really. The bit the user sees is only 10% of the whole - they never really know about the 90% that's under the surface.
[Edit: Darn, I thought that was a really original analogy. But Joel got there first.]
I was just checking the in-flight movies for my trip to Seattle and environs (flying out this Thursday, 23 September and returning Tuesday/Wednesday 28/29 September), and saw that my airline, Delta, are offering the following choice of film for westbound and southbound flights in North America at the end of October:
Seems in the same vein as Adrian Mole buying Disaster at 30,000 Feet for Pandora Braithwaite...
A fairly fundamental rule of software, here: if you have a non-fatal error, you write it to the log. You don't present it to the end-user, particularly if you're providing a service. What do I care that you can't create a thread, particularly if you went on to render the whole page anyway?
According to Netcraft, sluggy.com runs Apache 1.3.31 on FreeBSD. Worth reading!
In all my frustration with SonicStage, I completely forgot about the other piece of software - MD Simple Burner. In reading the manual this morning, I discovered that this is the software which allows you to rip a CD and burn directly to MD. Why this requires a separate piece of software is best known to Sony.
In trying to solve the problem with getting CD information, I discovered that there's a newer version of SonicStage - 2.1 - than that offered by the support site. You get this one by going to http://www.connect.com/download.html. After installing it initially didn't work but I noticed it had added a bunch of RunOnce keys to self-register a number of DLLs. For modern Windows install packages, you should be using Windows Installer and should not be using self-registration - Windows Installer can't repair a self-registration. Anyway, I added myself to the Administrators group, rebooted, logged in, and tried to register for CDDB. This time, it worked. Registering MD Simple Burner worked too. The problem was probably just a DLL not registered correctly.
SonicStage still doesn't do anything particularly useful (it still works as a media player) as a limited user. MD Simple Burner works fine, but a little further investigation reveals that it's actually a service running under the LocalSystem account, with the Interactive flag set. Horrible black mark of the blackest possible black, darker than a black hole.
Digression: I don't mind having a service doing the work if it's truly impossible to do it any other way, but control should always be through an IPC mechanism, with the UI running under the user's normal logon session. We've discovered with Meteor that services marked Interactive only appear on the console, not through Terminal Services. Doing it the IPC way can, I anticipate, get you remote administration with little extra effort.
OK, after writing this entry, I thought some more about it, then eventually ordered a MZ-NH900 from unbeatable.co.uk. Not a bad turn-around, since I actually ordered it last Saturday night (and when I say night, I mean about 11pm) - it turned up today. I decided not to spend the extra £35 or so on the NH1 because it only has one extra feature (time-stamping recorded tracks) and worse battery life. This one's battery chemistry is NiMH again, though.
Impressions so far: there's a lot in the box - the player itself, a 1GB HMD1G disc, the power supply, charging cradle, an optical 'cable' for recording from optical digital sources, a USB cradle for use with the software, and the software itself, a remote and pair of crappy earphones. They haven't actually gone in the bin, but I took one look and plugged in my EX71s instead. Haven't tried the remote yet - it's compatible in the sense that the EX71s have a relatively short cable (about 50cm) with a standard inline 3.5mm 3-contact plug plus a really long extension cable with a right-angle plug, and the remote's headphone socket is also a 3.5mm 3-contact.
The player itself is a little plasticky, which is a bit disappointing - only the top cover is aluminium with plastic controls, the rest of the body is plastic. I was also disappointed with that on my Dell Axim x30 - it looks like it ought to be metal on the website, but no - it's all plastic (apart from the stylus, weirdly). The controls seem fairly solid, although volume and seek back/next are accomplished by tilting a central, well, joystick in the middle of the jog wheel in the four major compass directions. 'Clicking' the joystick is Play/Enter. I had to look that one up in the manual.
The menu and track selection (Navi) are a bit weird, but I suppose that's expected since it does cram a lot of features in. I think I'm getting the hang of 'next album' - press Group, then while the folder icon is flashing, move the jog dial or press Next. The USB socket cover is pretty flimsy and doesn't look like it'll keep much dust out - it's basically a hinged piece of white plastic with a catch on the end. USB is always via a cable - there's no USB connection through the cradle (another difference between this device and the NH1).
Sound quality is fine - on ATRAC-1 292kbps SP that I recorded with the old recorder, new material copied from 256kbps MP3, new material ripped to OpenMG ATRAC3plus 256kbps and material transcoded from high-rate VBR WMA.
Now to the software. Oh. My. God. It's. Awful.
We start by putting the CD in the drive. Because I'm a limited user, the first thing we see is this dialog:
OK, bang in the Administrator password, hit OK, the installer starts, click Install. The main installer launches three or four separate subinstallers (black mark no.1). At the end of the subinstallers, we get a 'finished installing, restart now' dialog with no standard Windows controls, and only a Restart button in the corner. Black mark #2. However, they've not disabled Close in the system menu - right-click the taskbar button and choose Close, it doesn't reboot. However it's probably a good idea to reboot, so I do.
The system restarts and I log on, then I'm faced with a bunch of 'file not found' message boxes as a few programs in the Run registry key fail to run (black mark 3). Ah, I see it's added three icons to the desktop without asking (#4), and something to the system tray (#5). Right-click the tray icon (MD Simple Burner) and Exit. Nothing. Do it again. Nothing. This could have been to do with AVG scanning the disk at the time... After leaving it alone for a while, it spits out an error and goes away. I try starting SonicStage, and it bitches about not being able to open the device because another program has it open (#6). I apply a bit of intuition and decide to install the software using my own account elevated to Administrators. I add myself to the Administrators group and log off and back on. I uninstall MD Simple Burner and SonicStage, reinstall, restart, and this time MD Simple Burner works. I clear the 'run at logon' option and exit, because SonicStage is still bitching about not being able to open the device. Yes, the two pieces of software supplied with my device don't co-operate with each other (#7).
So I go into SonicStage and check for a working link. Yep, it works, let's try copying They Might Be Giants' The Spine and The Spine Surfs Alone EP, which I downloaded over the weekend. I go to Import Media. It claims to be processing for a while, then finished. Nothing appears in My Library. Switching to the other views (Music Source, Transfer) and back still shows nothing (#8). I quit and restart, and sure enough my music has appeared. The actual playback on this PC is via my stereo anyway, so I don't have a lot.
The downloaded files are in MP3 256kbps CBR format. Copies fairly quickly, we're OK. I pick up the device and try to eject the disc - oh, I can't, it's not actually finished writing (#9). I wait for it to finish. I try again. Nope, still locked - I have to press Stop and wait for 'Eject Disc OK' before ejecting.
It sounds pretty good, actually - very little noticeable transcoding loss. In fact, I can hear details I couldn't on the original MP3s because of the relative crapness of my sound chipsets (C-Media on-board audio, here and at work) compared to actual HiFi equipment. I decide to give it a challenge and select Joe Satriani's Chords Of Life (the 20kbps sample does it no justice), which I previously ripped to WMA for testing playback on the Axim. That doesn't come off too well - and then I notice that the indicator on the device shows 'Hi-LP', which is 64kbps. Yes, the transcoded MP3s were at 64kbps and I barely noticed. Yeesh.
So I try again at 256kbps and... it skips the 'converting' stage. I play it back again, it's still Hi-LP. Hang on, what just happened? Yes, just like Windows Media Player, it caches transcoded files. Unlike WMP, there's no global option to clear the transcoded files, you have to go to each track, select Properties from the context menu, File Info tab, select the OpenMG format file from the list, and hit Delete File:
Black mark #10. Having done this it now re-encodes the file; better, but still a bit distorted. Listening to the WMA reveals that the distortion crept in there - I rip from the CD straight to OpenMG. Now I see what all those 'Record a CD' options were about - they mean Rip a CD, not Burn one. Black mark #11 for using non-standard and confusing terminology. Let's hit CD Info to get the track information:
Funny, didn't need to do that for Media Player. I click Yes, I get the same prompt again, I click Yes again, nothing apparently happens, and I don't get any track data. We're up to 12 now. I don't know how it thought it was going to register, since it doesn't open any sockets according to Process Explorer.
Yes, the distortion's still there at the peaks. Checking the CD with my headphones reveals that the CD is probably over the limit [note: read this article, another example of how the labels are destroying music] - the source material has clipping in it, which causes all the codecs to throw a wobbly. Nuts.
Note that you can't rip directly to MD - you have to rip into the library, then transfer to the device. Black mark #13.
Well, I'm not going to end my experiment with reduced privileges just for the sake of this piece of recalcitrant software, so I remove myself from the Administrators group again, and log off and on. Starting SonicStage this time spits out this error:
#14 right there, just for the message box. Let's see which functions work:
No Net Music Store?? I have to be privileged to use a website?? Oh well, I can live without that (but #15).
Oh you have got to be joking. I can't transfer to my device as a limited user, even though you've made it accessible as a USB removable drive? #16.
Ah, that will be the psychic transport for the retrieval of CD info again. I also see that Tools/Options is unavailable - #17.
Reading the Readme also says "Do not use SonicStage while logged on to a domain user account under Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional or Windows XP Home Edition." That last one would be a trick - XP Home doesn't support domains. I guess I won't be using it at work, then!
I could go on, but this post is long enough already. I sympathise with the Channel 9 reader who asked for NetMD device support in Windows Media Player - but it ain't gonna happen, Sony just won't reveal that information, and I don't think Microsoft have the energy or inclination to support what's really quite a small user population.
These bugs and misfeatures prevent this application from really being the tool it should be - a way to get source media onto the MiniDisc. Instead they've built yet another incompatible player.
Roadworks. We all hate 'em, but we know they're a necessary evil - if you want your water, gas, electricity, phones (internet) to keep working, your roads not to get completely undriveable, and bridges not to collapse on the roads, you need a certain amount of maintenance.
Recently, though, I've been seeing a problem with - er - pavementworks being signed as if they're roadworks; that is, work being carried out on the pavement (sidewalk) is marked up with 'roadworks' and 'road narrows' signs.
Except that the road doesn't narrow. Often I've seen it marked up where pedestrians - even wheelchair users - can get past the roadworks without having the leave the pavement. This is annoying because for a moment it distracts you, as a driver - where's the hazard I have to look out for? Is it round the next corner? Hang on, I can see triangular signs facing the other way on the other side of the road, it must be between here and there somewhere... oh there it is, right out of the way, not a hazard at all.
I've also been seeing something disturbing, though. In, I presume, an effort not to block the pavement with the (unnecessary) signs, the signs are being placed with one leg on the pavement, one on the roadway. This effectively reduces the width of the carriageway, requiring more care.
Finally, this morning, on my way out of Charvil to Twyford to pick Ian up, I found the roadsigns right in the middle of the carriageway, requiring that I drive on the wrong side of the road - the irony being that the sign in the middle of the left-hand carriageway is warning about the road narrowing on the right. Well, yes it does now narrow on the right - because you put a bloody sign in the middle of the road!! Sadly, there was no sign warning me of the road narrowing on the left due to the sign in the middle of the bloody road! This went beyond annoying, it was downright dangerous.
This site is prone to traffic jams anyway - the one this morning hadn't tailed back that far, but it was far enough that after picking Ian up I turned round and headed back down the same bloody road to get back to the A4.
When I came back this evening the signs had reoccupied their usual station half-on, half-off the carriageway. They're still completely pointless.
SecurityFocus reports (syndicated in The Register) on a man prosecuted for 'war spamming' - driving past buildings, connecting to unprotected wireless networks in order to launder his spam messages.
You should protect your WLAN as strongly as you can. Failing to do so is like putting a network port on the outside of your building with a flashing neon sign pointing to it saying 'Free Internet Here!' or 'Please Attack!'.
There are several steps you can take. First, change your service-set ID (SSID) from the default. The SSID identifies your network. You can also stop the access points from broadcasting the SSID - an attacker would then have to guess it in order to connect - at the cost of having to type it in to all your devices.
Secondly, encrypt your traffic. Pick the strongest method your hardware supports:
WEP using a 40-bit key is basically useless - WEP is known to have holes and a 40-bit key can be broken quite quickly.
If you have Windows XP SP2, try the Wireless Network Setup Wizard in Control Panel. You'll probably have to type (or paste) the keys into the access point configuration, though.
That's pretty good protection, but if you want to go further, some access points also offer access-control; only devices with particular hardware MAC addresses - essentially the network card's identity - will be allowed to connect. However, some cards allow the MAC address to be overridden in software, so this protection could be defeated. The attacker doesn't know what might be a valid MAC, though, so he'll have to try lots of possibilities.
Finally you may want to change the router's password to stop someone changing the configuration. This is actually quite low priority, IMO, because the attacker must already have connected.
My feeling is that routers shouldn't work out-of-the-box with WiFi enabled, or if they do, that each router manufactured has a different default SSID and has WPA enabled with a different default key. The router would be supplied with a label and a USB key-drive containing the settings. On-by-default is just too insecure.
I thought I'd take a look on the MSN Music beta site, see what it's like. It's pretty clean, actually - normally MSN sites are chock full of ads. It just has a small Sponsored Sites section over on the right-hand side. I decided to search for "presidents", for which the top hit is Weird Al Yankovic's "Gump" (a parody of PUSA's "Lump") - and got this ad:
Ooookkaaay...
The whole business with lucky or unlucky numbers is ridiculous. Today's post on This Is Broken shows a lift with the floor request buttons in right-to-left, bottom-to-top order, but a lot of the comments noted that there's no button 13. This is not because you can't get to floor 13; it's that there is no floor 13: 14 is directly above 12.
Coincidentally this weekend Michael Schumacher won his seventh Formula 1 world championship title on the occasion of Ferrari's 700th race, but he only came second in the race. This was the 14th race of the season; Schumacher won the 13th race at Hungary two weeks ago, on a track where the previous year he'd been lapped before the end.
Car number 7 hasn't been too lucky for Jarno Trulli this year (if anyone had a lucky number, you'd have to say it was Schumacher's number 1, except that he's earned it) although he did qualify first and go on to win at Monaco. Car number 13 hasn't been unlucky for anybody; just like the architects, F1 doesn't issue number 13. By rights it should have gone to Mark Webber, but he's really done as well as could be expected with the horribly unreliable and underperforming Jaguar. Of course, Jaguar got cars numbered 14 and 15 (rather than 13 and 14) - because they finished 7th last year!
I've been trying to think of a way to get a general 'contact me' link up that doesn't put a public email address on the web - I get enough spam already, thanks. While I have a triple-pronged approach (Cloudmark SpamNet for known-spam, SpamBayes for heuristic scanning, Brightmail at my [mail] ISP) I still have to download the stuff that gets through Brightmail - about 16 items per day at present, about 25% of which are actually non-delivery reports where someone's used a fake sender address with my domain in it.
Anyway, enough digression. If you want to just send me stuff, please reply to this post. I'll try to delete your comment after I've dealt with it, if you want me to. I'll put a link to this post in the sidebar. If you don't want to register, please just use the anonymous comment facility; if you do leave an anonymous comment, please leave your name!
Back in 1999 I bought a Sony MZ-R55 MiniDisc recorder (in yellow), in part to replace the increasingly-unreliable cassette players, for the princely sum of £250. I'll admit there was an element of comfort purchase about it - women buy clothes, geeky men buy techie toys...
Now it's over five years old and on the whole it's doing OK - it's got a slight dent in the top cover where I must have dropped it (or something on it) pretty hard, and the battery cover has lost a lot of its metallic paint - the rest of the shell is anodised aluminium. It's on its second rechargeable 'chewing gum' battery (the battery is about the size and shape of a pack of chewing gum) and the second set of earphones - the first set I'd used previously with a number of cassette players and had lasted about eight years (!), the second I bought last year after the first set's junction between the main stereo cable and the cable to the right earphone finally failed. The unit shipped with crap earphones as always. Despite having a short cord and a long extension, making them suitable for use with the remote, I always use the extension and never the remote. Basically I don't like showing off that I have it - all anyone can see is the cable going into my pocket.
However, it's started to report DISC ERROR periodically, particularly with discs I've only recently recorded. I did get a cleaning disc which may have helped a little. I have to punch in track information manually, although my newer stereo, bought a couple of years ago, outputs the track mark information on the optical cable so I no longer have to mark the tracks myself as I did when I first bought it. And the battery life is pretty short: the original spec says four hours but it seems less. The NiMH chemistry deteriorates over time. Creating a new MD from source material means recording in real-time. And the player only supports the original bitrate (now named 'SP') or the ability to double recording time... by recording in mono.
So I'm contemplating a new player. I can think of a few choices:
Let's look at these options. The RAM-based player and the Axim are much the same, except that the Axim is obviously not a fixed-function device. I've tried this option, but it's a bit noisy, and leaves gaps between tracks. You can't get a whole album at a decent bit-rate into the RAM. By my calculations, music recorded at 192kbps takes up about 113MB for 80 minutes. SD cards at 128MB cost £16 from dabs. I'm not paying as much, or more, for the blank media as I did for the music. OK, I could put multiple originals on one card - I'm not sure if the Axim would support a single 1GB media at £84/card, but we're still looking at about £11 per album (depending of course on the album!)
RAM-based players either have the same problem as above, or only have internal RAM, making it time consuming and irritating to change media. If I want to play something else at the moment, I can carry a number of media around with me and simply change discs. With an internal-memory player, if you can't put your whole collection on it, you can only change what's on it by synchronising with a PC. That's not for me. With the portable MD recorder I can hook up to an optical digital or an analogue source (if I remembered the cables...) to capture new music.
OK, that's two options discarded. What about hard-disk players?
They're bigger than my old R55. Sony have managed to squeeze their new MZ-NH1 down even from that, which is pretty impressive considering they're dramatically limited by the size of the disc. An iRiver H120, like Ian Griffiths recently bought, weighs nearly twice as much (although both weigh considerably less than the '55). However, the H120 costs £215 from Amazon, whereas the NH1 costs £225. That's pretty comparable, considering that the NH1 has essentially limitless upgradability. Standard MDs have 80-minute capacity with the old 292kbps ATRAC encoding, but a Hi-MD player can squeeze 305MB out of a standard disc, allowing (allegedly) 140 minutes with the new Hi-SP codec.
To be honest, though, I don't want to cram all my music collection onto one disc or player. I don't use shuffle much - I like to hear albums as the artist intended. It may not be an issue in the pop world, but I'm a rock fan, particularly progressive, alternative rock, or indie, where the album as a whole tells a story. Organisation is a key feature for me. At only a little over £1 per disc for an 80-minute MD (a little under if you buy a 50-pack!) expandability is fine. I can't find out how much the new discs cost, which is a bit of a warning light.
Another feature of course with MiniDisc is direct interchangeability of discs with other players/recorders. My car currently has a cassette player, but I've thought about changing it for something else. Pushing your high-quality digital music through a cassette adapter or FM broadcast is a bit on the stoopid side, IMO.
Battery life seems, incredibly, a little better on the newest MiniDiscs than on the HDD players.
Looks like it's going to be MiniDisc, again. I might be able to pick up an MZ-N10 from eBay, since there's a few retailers that still seem to have a small stock (and there are 'buy it now' prices at £120). Otherwise I think an MZ-NH1.
[Edit: rashin' fruffin' mashin' (speak like Muttley) double-encoding bug, note cool new WYSIWYG editor on blogger.com]
When writing that last post, I searched for svchost (before deciding to link to Larry's comment), and got these Sponsored Links:
I'd be pretty dubious about using any piece of anti-spyware software that flagged svchost.exe itself as being spyware - it's just a shell. However, various keyloggers and other trojans might be installed into that shell. As always, they can't do this unless you're running as an administrator (or you've changed the ACLs on the keys).
You do need to use your head when reading anti-spyware reports. I ran Ad-Aware a couple of days ago, and all it reported was my use of about:blank as my start page (Lavasoft: about: is a genuine protocol) and a bunch of innocuous cookies.
Edit: After a number of comments about different permutations of the name and mass-mailer worms using the actual name but in a different directory, I feel I should point out that viruses (true file-infecting viruses) can infect any binary. What I was trying to point to in this post is that the advert baldly says 'Svchost.exe is Spyware'. That goes too far.
[Let's see if I finish this series...]
Last week I wrote about running with reduced privileges. In that post I talked about using the LsaLogonUser API to create a new token, adding additional SIDs, and writing a service that would do this. In this post, I'm going to talk about some design aspects.
Let's summarize the requirements:
Let's look at how we do this. For authorization, we should leverage the existing security APIs as far as possible - this allows us to use the standard security dialogs which administrators are already familiar with. Therefore, we'll use the AccessCheck API to check ACLs that we store somewhere in order to check whether the user's authorised, or whether the override credentials they present (option 2 above) are authorised to override.
For consistency, even though we'll have the user's alleged password, we'll have the service impersonate its client to do access checks. We'll therefore be using their existing token, not any changes that have been made to the token since they logged on.
The right place to store the ACLs is probably somewhere in the registry; I'm going to store them in the service's Parameters key. Let's choose a name for the service: I'll call it RunElSvc. This makes our Parameters key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RunElService\Parameters. We'll put an ACL on this key itself so Administrators and LocalSystem have Full Control, and no one else has any permissions. Note that this is exactly what the SCM does - the Security key under the service contains a security descriptor (in binary format) and the key itself has an ACL as above.
I'm not sure whether it will be possible for a domain administrator to control this through Group Policy - something to look into later!
We'll also need to define the security mask bits for the ACL - the specific bits and the mapping of the generic bits. Ironically here the standard bits (DELETE, READ_CONTROL, WRITE_DAC, WRITE_OWNER and SYNCHRONIZE) don't mean a lot for this 'object'. So I think we just define bit 0 to mean 'can' if set and 'can't' if not, and map GENERIC_EXECUTE and GENERIC_ALL to set bit 0 if they're set. Actually, we could use a single security descriptor with multiple bits (one each for 'can raise to Administrators', 'can raise to PU', 'can override other bits') rather than multiple SDs.
We want the actual API to seem familiar, so starting from CreateProcessWithLogonW is probably a good idea.
BOOL CreatePrivilegedProcessW(
LPCWSTR lpPassword,
LPCWSTR lpOverrideUsername,
LPCWSTR lpOverrideDomain,
LPCWSTR lpOverridePassword,
LPCWSTR lpApplicationName,
LPWSTR lpCommandLine,
DWORD dwCreationFlags,
LPVOID lpEnvironment,
LPCWSTR lpCurrentDirectory,
LPSTARTUPINFOW lpStartupInfo,
LPPROCESS_INFORMATION lpProcessInfo
);
Internally the service will call CreateProcessAsUser once it's got a token. We'll have to do a bit of copying to ensure the right environment, etc., is used rather than the service's environment.
This wouldn't be complete if we didn't think about what possible threats there will be. The major one is probably remote exploitation, which we'll mitigate by using the ncalrpc protocol. We do have to watch for the possibility that some other protocol is used, if our service ends up sharing a process, since RPC allows the union of all protocols registered by all endpoints in the process. My initial plan is for the service to run in its own process, but eventually it might run in a svchost (thanks for the comment, Larry!)
I'll have to admit I don't have experience of threat modelling.
Eric Sink has just started a series of articles on Source Control: an introduction for SCM novices. In his introduction, he writes:
"My goal for this series of articles is to help people learn how to do source control. I work for SourceGear, a developer tools ISV. We sell an SCM tool called Vault. Through the experience of selling and supporting this product, I have learned something rather surprising: Nobody is teaching people how to do source control.
"Our universities don't teach people how to do source control, or at least mine didn't. We graduate with Computer Science degrees. We know more than we'll ever need to know about discrete math, artificial intelligence and the design of virtual memory systems. But many of us enter the workforce with no knowledge of how to use any of the basic tools of software development, including bug-tracking, unit testing, code coverage, source control, or even IDEs."
Coincidentally, I also saw Jim Gries' Debugging Glossary post when reading through the blogs.msdn.com feed (actually I read this through the browser rather than either of my aggregators), in which he says:
"[D]uring a recent UI meeting here at work, one of our PM's (Habib Heydarian) mentioned that while at Tech Ed, he was shocked at just how many developers don't have an understanding of the terms used while debugging, let alone how to use a debugger effectively."
In my final year at Aston, the CS department were looking for ways to improve the performance of the Combined Honours students taking the Introduction to Systematic Programming course (no longer on the website; since I wrote my last post on the subject, the site has been updated, and now the initial programming course [PDF] is taught in Java). Formerly, lab sessions were run by either the lecturers or by post-graduate students, many of whom were unfamiliar in Ada, the language taught. That year, the department decided to ask final-year undergraduate students who had scored highly in ISP to assist with lab sessions. I was one of those people. The hours weren't onerous (two or three one-hour sessions per week) and the pay reasonable at £8 per hour, which helped a little.
By this point I'd bought and read, on Ian's recommendation, Steve Maguire's classic Writing Solid Code, in which he recommends single-stepping through every new piece of code you write using an online interactive debugger. Doing this as a matter of course opened my eyes - desk-checking a program is all very well, but you run into the problem where you think you know what the code does. You miss the bugs because you're not looking for them. There's no substitute for actually running the program and seeing what it does, and if you single-step, you find out exactly what code is hit and what your variable values were.
When we were asked for suggestions for the course, I suggested including a session on using the debugger. We were limited of course by the available tool suite: using GNAT as the compiler and hence GDB as the debugger (actually the gdbtk GUI front-end). However, any debugger is still better than trying to debug through print statements. The edit/compile/run cycle to add a new statement to print some variable you missed last time distracts from the sessions.
This suggestion was radical because many lecturers were of the opinion that online interactive debuggers are useless; after all, you've formally proved your specification, used a CASE tool to generate your code and desk-checked any hand-written code - how can there possibly be bugs after that?
Over here in the real world we know that formal proof works only for really small systems and takes a really long time and therefore costs a lot. We also know that a CASE tool can only really generate programs that the CASE tool's designer intended it to build - novelty is heavily restricted with these tools.
CS course designers: do your students a favour by learning how to use a debugger, then teach your students. If you need a resource, or a course textbook, try John Robbins' Debugging Applications for Microsoft .NET and Microsoft Windows. Yes, it's Windows-centric. Yes, it's far more than just an introduction to debugging - it even has some material on optimising your working set toward the end. But the first three chapters (part 1 - The Gestalt Of Debugging) are a must-read for all developers, on any platform, with any language, using any debugger.
I've found TheElderGeek.com's guide to services useful.
My definition of svchost.exe is that it's a process which supports plug-in service DLLs. You see multiple svchost processes to mitigate the effects if one service running in a host process crashes, and so that different services can run using different credentials (and hence privileges).
Currently I have six svchosts running, three of which run as LocalSystem, two as Network Service and one as Local Service. One of the LocalSystem hosts is running Terminal Services and DCOM Launcher; another is running HTTP SSL for the HTTP.SYS driver (new in Server 2003 and XP SP2); the third runs most other services. One of the Network Service hosts runs RPCSS, the Remote Procedure Call subsystem while the other runs DNS Client. Finally the Local Service host runs the TCP NetBIOS Helper, the Remote Registry service, the Universal Plug-and-Play listener, and the WebDAV client.
'Scuse me, just going to turn off Remote Registry, I don't need that.
After the last entry and discovering that the at trick still works, I asked myself this question: do tasks created through Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks need the Task Scheduler service?
Sadly, they do.
However, I don't currently have any scheduled tasks, so I've disabled the service. If you want to do the same, either use the Services MMC snap-in, or you can use sc...
sc config schedule start= disabled
Edit (2004-09-02): OK, I've re-enabled it. A number of readers (I have readers?!?) mentioned that a number of system optimisation features also run using the Schedule service, something I confirmed with Filemon. Obviously the ability to create a job that starts as LocalSystem is a bit disconcerting, but it seems that this can only be done locally by an authenticated administrator. I'd prefer to have a separate optimisation service, but you can't have everything.
The Register: Windows XP SP2 features security crater - report
Basically, a malicious program can add a new WMI provider to the root\SecurityCenter namespace - an instance of AntiVirusProduct or FirewallProduct. Windows XP SP2's Security Center may then report that an anti-virus product or firewall product is installed and working correctly, even when one is not.
The mitigation, though, is that WMI is indeed read-write - for Administrators. PC Magazine's original article (attributed to eWeak by The Register's pet hack) makes this clear.
I was thinking along the lines of changing the ACL on this namespace so that only LocalSystem is able to create new providers, but failed since the ACLs are inherited - but you can't clear the inheritance in the MMC WMI Control snap-in (it's in the Computer Management console). However, this would only add a small hindrance since by default on XP SP2, at.exe still exists and still allows you to do
at 23:39 /interactive cmd
to get a command interpreter running as LocalSystem:
C:\>dumptoken
Process primary token
This is a unrestricted token
Token type: primary
Token ID: 0x25066b9
Authentication ID: 0x3e7
Token's owner: BUILTIN\Administrators (alias)
Token's source: *SYSTEM* (0x0)
Token's user: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM (user)
Token's primary group: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM (user)
[...]
(dumptoken from w00w00.org)
This only works if you're an administrator, of course.
And if you think about it, most WMI providers get registered with WMI by an installer, running as an administrator. I'm not too sure about the default ACL for the root namespace which allows Everyone to modify provider information, though.
Anyway, what's the point of misreporting the firewall or antivirus status? A program running using a token containing the Administrators group SID (or, loosely, running as an administrator) can punch a hole in the firewall using the firewall administration API - how many users will regularly check the list of exceptions? It can normally install a device driver. It could install a file-system filter driver below the anti-virus filter driver in the disk driver stack and remove any trace of its own code (you'd probably need to add another one above to add the code back in so it could run).
The true mitigation, as for most things, is to run as a regular user. Don't run as a member of the Administrators group.
Raymond Chen has recently been writing about the /3GB switch, virtual memory and physical memory. If you don't understand what virtual memory is, go there now.
Back? Good. I want to talk about a situation where you might run out of virtual address space a long time before you run out of RAM. Exchange's documentation recommends that if you have more than 1GB of memory you should enable the /3GB switch. As Raymond notes, basically the STORE.EXE process, due to inefficiencies, uses more virtual address space than actual RAM.
In a comment on Carmen Crincoli's blog, Larry Osterman mentioned that the NT heap manager expands the virtual address space for a heap in powers of two. Note that this doesn't mean the physical memory used goes up like that - Windows will only allocate physical memory to a process on demand and only up to its maximum working set size, unless memory is more abundant than that. However, you can get into a situation where your heap's virtual address space resembles a Swiss cheese - there's plenty of free memory, but it's all in small free blocks. To allocate a large block, Windows has to expand the heap's address space, which it does by allocating a new chunk of address space twice the current size of the heap. It must be possible for this to be multiple chunks - this algorithm would start running into problems at around 512MB or so of virtual addresses if it allocated a single contiguous block...
What's the initial size of the heap? It's marked in the executable's header - the default generated by the MS linker is 1MB.
Note that Windows supports multiple heaps. The recommended practice is actually to have one heap for each distinct type (or at least size) of object; I think I've written about this before. Unfortunately many APIs don't give you a choice where something is allocated - they just dump it on the default heap.
[Edit: I knew something was bothering me about the original title - I confused VM with virtual addresses - as we know, they're not the same thing...]
...have taken over the Channel 9 forums. You can tell that few of them have ever run a server OS for anything real, and have swallowed the Unix pill whole (although I suspect some have taken it as a suppository - there's certainly something stuck up their arse...) Few of the developers seem to have actually shipped a product and have any understanding of what it actually takes to maintain software and provide compatibility between versions - nor that users need compatibility between versions, or that MS might have, you know, done some research.
It's a shame because C9 was getting something of a conversation going between Microsoft users (as opposed to abusers) and the product teams. I'm still going to watch the videos, though.
In other news, I see that the horde now seem to have got bored with trying to bait the IE blog.
I know I have to get to it sometime. In the current climate, anything you can do to mitigate the effects of a successful attack is worthwhile - and there's no sign of things letting up.
So I've taken my normal user account out of the Administrators group - I'm just a user again.
Now, clearly, as a power user, a developer, an occasional gamer and the machine owner, I still need to be able to launch programs as an Administrator. The runas tool is helpful here! However, there are times when you want a program to run with elevated privileges, but in your own context.
Aaron Margosis, a Microsoft consultant, has come up with a couple of useful tools. The first is a batch file which automates the process of adding your account to the Administrators group, creating a new shell, then removing the account again. The second is a toolbar which shows how privileged you are, in IE and Explorer.
If you're familiar with how Windows authorization works, feel free to skip this paragraph. Windows authorizes users against resources by comparing access control lists against the SIDs (Security IDs - internal representations of user accounts or security groups) in your token. The token can either be a primary token or an impersonation token. You typically get a primary token by logging on; servers can temporarily assume another identity by impersonating their client. Also included in your token are your privileges - actions you're allowed to take which may override the ACLs or allow other actions (e.g. shutting down the system). Privileges are orthogonal to access rights. The token is a cached copy of what you were allowed when you logged on - it contains the SIDs for all groups you were a member of and the privileges assigned to all SIDs.
Adding yourself to the Administrators group therefore has no effect until you next log on. Aaron's batch file gets round this by using runas to create a new logon session and hence a new token. You cannot replace the primary token for a running process - you can only create a process with a different token by calling CreateProcessAsUser.
The downsides to Aaron's batch file are two: one, that it requires you to type both the Administrator and your own password; two, that there's a window where your account is explicitly in the Administrators group (between typing the Administrator's password and typing your own).
This second one is possibly a risk. If your system crashes at this point, you're likely to still be in the Administrators group when you restart. If a service running with your credentials starts in this window, it will have privileges you didn't expect. A network logon with these credentials will also gain administrative privileges.
Can we do better? I think so. The LsaLogonUser function takes a TOKEN_GROUPS parameter which allows us to arbitrarily add groups to the new token, assuming successful authentication. The spike I put together over the last two days suggests that any privileges awarded to the (enabled) SIDs added to the token are also added to the token. This only requires us to supply the user's password - we don't need the administrator's. We can't totally automate it because Windows doesn't store the authenticated password in plain text - unless we circumvent things further, e.g. by adding a 'network provider' so that NPLogonNotify gets called with the plain-text password, and storing this somewhere. This would of course be a very bad idea, enabling the possibility that the plain-text password could be disclosed.
Lest you think this is a horrible hole in the NT security model, I'll point out that to do this, you must have a trusted connection to the Local Security Authority. To get one of these, you must call LsaRegisterLogonProcess, which requires the 'Act as part of the operating system' (SE_TCB_NAME) privilege (see what I mean about privileges being different from access rights?). In essence, that means running under the LocalSystem security context.
So where from here? Basically, I need to write a service which will listen for local requests (probably through RPC) and use the supplied credentials to create a token then create the appropriate process. This is going to be an adventure because before yesterday I'd never written a service! I'll be writing it in C++ because quite frankly there'd be no benefit in using C# due to the amount of P/Invoke marshalling required. I'll have to learn how to write RPC servers and clients, work out which logon provider to call (obviously the same one that the user used!) and how to write events to the event log. I'll also need to design access control so administrators can control who gets to do this.
I see from comments on Robert Scoble's blog that Downhill Battle have been asked to remove the SP2 torrent links. The reason is apparently that they don't want things to be downloaded from other sites. I suppose it prevents MS monitoring how many people have actually downloaded it - but how can they guess how many times a particular download, particularly of the network install, has been used?
BitTorrent has mechanisms to check that the download was received correctly: the Torrent file includes precomputed hashes for each block so that the client can determine whether it has received that block successfully. These hashes use the SHA1 algorithm. The whole download is also hashed - a download can be made up of multiple files. This hash is used to locate the peers.
In the particular case of SP2, the file is also digitally signed by Microsoft. This ensures that it really is the genuine release, or at least that the file hasn't been modified since it was signed and it was signed by an organisation claiming to be Microsoft. It appears to have had the right effects, so I'm sticking with it.
Interestingly, though, Microsoft haven't tried to take down the tracker. Clearly there's a lack of understanding in how BitTorrent really works.
I'm trying to decide whether to host the .torrent file myself. I'm still hosting the torrent itself - upload rate currently 24KB/s.
Ian Griffiths: Raw Sockets Gone in XP SP 2.
Michael Howard: A little more info on raw sockets and Windows XP SP2.
I think what Michael's basically saying is that data sent through a raw socket is parsed by the stack, any packets with protocol 6 (TCP) are discarded, and any packets with protocol 17 (UDP) must have an outgoing IP address matching one of the interfaces or it's dropped. This prevents programs using raw sockets to disguise what they're up to using the standard Internet protocols - hopefully preventing zombies from disguising the origins of their packets.
If you really need to do this, you can still use a device driver which avoids the Microsoft TCP/IP stack entirely, such as WinPcap. Dana Epp's already produced a patch for nmap which causes it to revert to using WinPcap (it's a two-line patch!)
This probably means, of course, that new zombie programs will just come with WinPcap, because I don't think SP2 limits driver loading (aside from it being limited to users/groups with the Load or unload device drivers privilege, granted to the Administrators group by default).
Ian Griffiths wrote an interesting article. However, I have to take issue with a bit of it:
"A clear example of where general purpose CPUs have become fast enough to render special purpose chips obsolete is in mobile phones. (Or 'cellphones', as I believe they're usually called in the USA.) A few years ago, all digital mobile phones had two processors in them: a general purpose one to handle the signalling protocol and user interface, and a specialised digital signal processor (DSP). [...] Having these two processors was a problem. The extra processor made phones bigger, shortened battery life, and decreased reliability as a result of the increased component count. But it was necessary because only a specialised DSP was fast enough to perform the necessary processing, while a general purpose CPU was required to handle the signalling protocol and user interface. But a few years ago, the performance of low-power embedded CPUs (and in particular the ARM CPU) got to the point where one general purpose CPU could do all of the work."
My understanding is that the DSP is in fact still used - but it's no longer a separate chip. Instead it's been absorbed as an 'IP core' into the same chip which houses the display controller, keyboard controller, serial interface controllers, memory controller and the CPU core. It's still loosely labelled the 'CPU' but to reflect the changed role it's now sometimes called an 'application processor'.
See, the way chips are designed has changed quite a bit. When I was at University, and still studying Electronics, we were taught how to use a language known as VHDL. Originally this language was used for simulating circuits before producing them, but a changeover was in progress for instead synthesizing circuits: getting a compiler to generate code for programming a programmable logic chip, and eventually actual masks for producing silicon.
This has lead to a market in, essentially, source code for circuits: the ability to buy in IP cores for a dedicated chip. By combining IP cores a single chip to run a device can be produced - if you're producing millions of them, you can save a heck of a lot. A major reason ARM have been so successful is that they've licensed their processor cores, in addition to manufacturing their own CPUs - basically the core connected directly to the pins. Almost every ARM-compatible application processor out there - Texas Instruments, Samsung, whoever - is basically a licensed ARM core - an actual ARM design - decorated with whatever other cores the ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) decided to throw in.
Take my new Dell Axim X30. It features an Intel PXA270 processor. This single chip has the latest XScale core (Intel's design implementing the ARM5 instruction set - Intel actually design their own cores, rather than using ARM's design), a memory controller capable of controlling SDRAM, Static RAM and Flash ROM, an LCD controller with 256KB of on-board RAM, a USB host controller, a camera capture interface, Smart Digital media I/O controller, a SIM card interface, keypad controller, 3 standard UARTs (serial devices), audio controller, CompactFlash controller, and USB client implementation. Some of these parts are probably licensed cores (although Intel do have the resources to design their own).
[Edit] I need to review these things before posting them. I forgot to add this bit:
Recent ARM cores do have Java bytecode interpreters apparently in hardware - ARM call this Jazelle. However, it must be remembered that Java was originally designed to be interpreted. CIL was not - it was designed to be JIT compiled. Eventually even Sun had to realise that JIT-compiling Java produced far better-performing programs than interpretation ever could.
I'm sticking it out with IE after what I discovered about the current state of FireFox security. Unfortunately, in SP2, it seems as though the cache bugs are still there.
So I've started using CacheSentry, a free program for monitoring and cleaning up your cache. And I think I'll be sticking with the free version: the (proposed) UI for CacheSentry Pro is close on the verge of a submission to The Daily WTF or This Is Broken.
Slight disadvantages are that CacheSentry's limit for cache size is 700MB, and IE doesn't behave quite right when it hits CacheSentry's limit - I started getting stylesheet-missing problems again. However, dropping the limit to 500MB then expanding it again seems to have worked for the moment.
The author has documented some bugs in IE's cache mechanism. I say IE's - I should say WinInet's, as that's the component that does the caching.
Last week, Larry Osterman blogged a little about TransmitFile. I was sure I'd read somewhere that it was implemented entirely in kernel mode, but I couldn't find that assertion.
So I pulled out DUMPBIN. This is what I found, after writing a little test server I call Really Simple File Transfer Protocol - it listens on a socket, then when a client connects it dumps a file down the connection; like I said, Really Simple. It's so simple it doesn't allow concurrent connections.
The TransmitFile function in MSWSOCK.DLL is a simple wrapper around a call to WSAIoctl using the SIO_GET_EXTENSION_FUNCTION_POINTER control code, then calling the result (if WSAIoctl does not return SOCKET_ERROR). For a standard TCP socket using Microsoft's stack, the WSAIoctl call returns the address of mswsock!MSAFD_TransmitFile (an internal function, you won't see it in the export table). In turn, this function does a bit of checking then calls ntdll!NtDeviceIoControlFile, then waits for an object to be signalled and returns. NtDeviceIoControlFile is the underlying NT function called by DeviceIoControl - MSWSOCK.DLL is calling into the TCP device driver, MSAFD.SYS.
I decided to stop there, as I already had enough of a headache from reading x86 disassembly...
In this post, I showed a screenshot of the 'Open File - Security Warning' dialog. But how does Explorer know to show this dialog - and how could you make it show in your own application, or write out the information from your own download application?
When Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, or Windows Messenger in XP SP2 write a downloaded file, they use the IAttachmentExecute interface (I think - the documentation is obscure). This writes an Alternate Data Stream on an NTFS drive, which is named 'Zone.Identifier'. For the HS5Setup program I took the screenshot for, it contains:
[ZoneTransfer]
ZoneId=3
(information captured with 'more' - 'type' wouldn't show the stream's contents)
When you open a file (I assume of a limited set of types, but I can't find any configuration for it) Windows checks for the Zone.Identifier stream, and if it finds it, and it's an Internet zone, you get the attachment security dialog.
Download links at sp2torrent.com. I decided not to wait for Automatic Updates to kick in, even if RC2 users will get the update first.
Since I started writing this post, it's downloaded another 13MB.
This is a scary prospect - Microsoft have confirmed it.
I suggest that companies not using Software Update Services either start doing so or set Automatic Updates to advise of new downloads only. I could cope with our developers making the switch one-by-one - they can handle any errors that result - but I think we need to manage our salesmen more closely. Specifically, we need to test that SP2 works properly with our VPN software and with their new laptops.
You can configure Automatic Updates through Group Policy without having to touch every computer, if you have an Active Directory-based domain.
Ironically I'm more worried about getting the salesmen updated ASAP than the developers, because I think the salesmen are less likely to practise safe computing. But it has to be organised.
http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/08/05/LinuxPatents.
I find this comment interesting:
"Second, the Linux community would—after some pain—figure out a way to route around the litigation; it would be real work, but it would happen."
OK, Tim, but you just wrote:
"The Lesson In software, assume that everything is already patented. You can't build anything, no matter how new it is, without infringing someone's patent."
You've got a vicious circle: in any attempt to avoid this patent (which you may not be able to do anyway, since the patent covers the method of implementation, not the actual code implementation itself) you may well end up infringing others. Remember Microsoft's proposed solution to the Eolas patent: don't perform the infringing operation (automatically scripting binary controls loaded into a page).
[Edit: Fixed nasty double-encoding error, sigh]
...but I did just get a new version of Windows Update v5.
It looks to me as though MS is going to push SP2 through Automatic Updates. I'm not sure this is a good idea. Yes, everyone should have SP2 - but only under their control, and only when they ask for it. This isn't a small patch - the RC2 download was 200MB or so. Even though Windows Installer 3.0 allegedly supports differential binary patching, if everything has been recompiled with the latest /GS implementation, a heck of a lot will have changed.
I just hope I won't have to uninstall RC2 before installing the RTM version.
MS has written one, which can be booted from either a floppy disk (what's one of those? 
) or a CD: download.
(via Dr. HardwareBlog)
...well, OK, it was nine years ago some time this week, I forget exactly.
When I was at school, around Christmas 1994, I joined a band with a few friends. In August of 1995, we recorded a number of songs we'd written (mostly by David Kane, our guitarist, often with Roger Barden, the keyboard player, although I and the drummer, Chris Velvick, also have writing credits). Since David is now getting married (in Toppenish, Washington, USA - he's marrying an American girl) in September, and I have some free time (
) I thought I'd get the demos onto CD. The master is a standard, albeit very expensive, audio cassette - it uses different material to get very low noise.
I also converted the songs to MP3. I thought I could actually upload all of them to my Demon web space, but it's only 20MB, and I encoded them (all 4+ minutes, we were a little long-winded) at 192kbps. There's arrogance. So there's only space for one, really. I've chosen one of my favourites: Survivor.
Oh, my part? I do the vocals. That's it. While I now play a bit of guitar - and Survivor is one of the few things I can play - I couldn't at the time.
As for what happened to the band - we found that our final Upper Sixth year was a lot harder than the previous one and didn't find a lot of time for rehearsing, let alone writing and recording new material. David continued with his Music A-level; David and Roger then took a year out travelling (Japan and the Amazon) before going to University to study Music at Bangor and History at Exeter (I think) respectively, starting in 1997. Christian studied Chemistry and drinking at Edinburgh, while I went to Aston (which I've written about before).
David is now studying for a PhD at SOAS having completed his MA in Ethnomusicology and I believe is still planning to visit Bangladesh again some time in the winter. Roger is with some kind of missionary organisation in Leeds, last I heard. Christian is some kind of high-powered recruitment consultant recruiting middle managers, somewhere in the Thames Valley - I last saw him a year ago at Roger's pre-wedding meal (you can't really call that a stag night 
).
And I'm muddling along as - mainly - a Pocket PC C/C++/C# developer working for 5D / Mnetics. It's a little unclear right now, actually - I answer the phone as Mnetics, but still officially work for 5D, which is now owned by Mnetics as of a couple of weeks ago.
[Update: I forgot to link to Audacity, the software I used to capture and manipulate the tracks.]
Well, I don't know about you, but I don't think video game violence actually has that much effect IRL. I mean, it's had no effect on me. I'm absolutely fine 
Anyway, it appears that Halo 2 (not mentioned by the Daily Mail, apparently) will be rated 16+ in the UK:
"The VSC was totally unconcerned with the murderization of Covenant forces. Apparently, if the game didn’t allow you to turn on your allies, we’d have gotten the UK equivalent of a PG, regardless of the galloons of alien blood we had flooded the Galaxy with. Britain is now completely unconcerned with bad language, as I discovered watching BBC TV in the hotel that night. Just as well, since every other word out of our game seemed to be bastard., asshole or bullshit.
"I did point out that technically, you can kill tens of thousands of Grunts, Elites, Brutes, Jackals and “others†while playing a typical game. “No problem, as long as they don’t look human,†said one of the chaps." -- Bungie Weekly Update 30/7/2004
For those not versed in floating point representations, NaN means 'Not a Number' - typically the result of division by zero.
(Windows Update v5, BTW)
...is a blog containing code (and sometimes other things) that make geeks go, WTF??
Today's horror just looks like a random jumble of appending constants that probably didn't need to be constants. Until you look more closely, and you realise it's constructing XML. Except there's a bug: tags are being closed with a backslash - \ - rather than the correct slash - /.
Just in case anyone needs the hint:
private static string FormatData( SqlDataReader dr )
{
using ( StringWriter sw = new StringWriter() )
{
XmlTextWriter tw = new XmlTextWriter( sw );tw.Formatting = Formatting.Indented;
tw.WriteStartElement( "Items" );
while ( dr.Read() )
{
tw.WriteStartElement( "Item" );
tw.WriteAttributeString( "key", (string)dr[0] );
tw.WriteString( (string)dr[1] );
tw.WriteEndElement();
}tw.WriteEndElement();
return sw.ToString();
}
}
If you need to write XML, use an XmlTextWriter. The code is shorter and clearer, and is more likely to work, considering cases like escaping invalid characters. Also note that I got it to indent the XML for me. Running this on a reader containing the results of SELECT emp_id, lname FROM employee on SQL Server's pubs database, we get:
<Items>
<Item key="A-C71970F">Cruz</Item>
<Item key="AMD15433F">Devon</Item>
<Item key="A-R89858F">Roulet</Item>
<Item key="ARD36773F">Domingues</Item>
<Item key="CFH28514M">Hernadez</Item>
<Item key="CGS88322F">Schmitt</Item>
<Item key="DBT39435M">Tonini</Item>
<Item key="DWR65030M">Roel</Item>
<Item key="ENL44273F">Lincoln</Item>
<Item key="F-C16315M">Chang</Item>
<Item key="GHT50241M">Thomas</Item>
<Item key="HAN90777M">Nagy</Item>
<Item key="HAS54740M">Snyder</Item>
<Item key="H-B39728F">Bennett</Item>
<Item key="JYL26161F">Labrune</Item>
<Item key="KFJ64308F">Josephs</Item>
<Item key="KJJ92907F">Jablonski</Item>
<Item key="LAL21447M">Lebihan</Item>
<Item key="L-B31947F">Brown</Item>
<Item key="MAP77183M">Paolino</Item>
<Item key="MAS70474F">Smith</Item>
<Item key="MFS52347M">Sommer</Item>
<Item key="MGK44605M">Karttunen</Item>
<Item key="MJP25939M">Pontes</Item>
<Item key="M-L67958F">Larsson</Item>
<Item key="MMS49649F">Saveley</Item>
<Item key="M-P91209M">Pereira</Item>
<Item key="M-R38834F">Rance</Item>
<Item key="PCM98509F">McKenna</Item>
<Item key="PDI47470M">Ibsen</Item>
<Item key="PHF38899M">Franken</Item>
<Item key="PMA42628M">Accorti</Item>
<Item key="POK93028M">Koskitalo</Item>
<Item key="PSA89086M">Afonso</Item>
<Item key="PSP68661F">Parente</Item>
<Item key="PTC11962M">Cramer</Item>
<Item key="PXH22250M">Henriot</Item>
<Item key="RBM23061F">Muller</Item>
<Item key="R-M53550M">Mendel</Item>
<Item key="SKO22412M">Ottlieb</Item>
<Item key="TPO55093M">O'Rourke</Item>
<Item key="VPA30890F">Ashworth</Item>
<Item key="Y-L77953M">Latimer</Item>
</Items>
From WinBase.h:
That's a lot of new capabilities right there.
Of course, due to my peculiar route through university, I ended up studying both the C and C++ courses twice, which tended to reinforce the principles - then for my final year project, I got very familiar with the C++ syntax and semantics. My friends already know my background, but I've had a few comments from people who don't, so here we go:
I entered Aston in September 1996 to study for an M.Eng in Electronic Systems Engineering - a four year full-time course. For any foreigners, a normal Bachelor's first degree in the UK has three years of full-time study, often optionally with an additional year spent on industrial placement. Normally, a Master's degree is postgraduate study, but M.Eng is atypical - it's a four-year first degree. When I started, you were supposed to get industrial placement work during summer vacations, but this rule was relaxed when it became clear that there weren't any placements available.
I attended that course for three years, scraping passes after resitting exams in both the first and second years (in one resit exam, my grade shot up from a failing grade to over 80%). In the third year a combination of factors (illness, extensive involvement in Entertainments, increasing complexity of mathematics) led to my deferring the exams. Over that summer I questioned my future direction and decided to apply for a transfer to Computing Science, which was granted. The departments accepted that my studies so far had covered all the material necessary to proceed directly to year 2. I completed year 2 with decent grades, then completed the final year fairly well, graduating with Lower Second-Class Honours (a 2:2, or Desmond).
The main thing that dragged my final Honours grade down was my final-year project. I'd decided to tackle a program to diagram the static structure of a program, with C++ as the source language. I got totally bogged down in the syntax and semantics of C++, and basically failed to complete the project. I don't do things by halves - I was trying to persuade a variety of parser generator tools to interpret standard C++ correctly. I suppose that I was taken in by my Programming Language Implementation lecturer, who claimed that parsing was the bit of CS that could be called 'science', because we know how to do it.
Not for C++, we don't. The commercial C++ parsers are either hand-written recursive-descent parsers which don't really follow any 'scientific' method (Visual C++), or based on yacc/bison with so much feedback between parser and lexer stages, and with so many bizarre actions in the middle of rules, that you can't call them LALR(1) any more (GCC).
Yes, I could have adapted GCC to handle the parsing. But quite frankly I didn't want to spend three months or more understanding how to hook into it.
The problem with C++ is just that it's hugely ambiguous and overloaded, with the distinguishing symbols - if any - an indeterminate distance from the beginning of a clause. This makes it great to write, IMO, and it's OK for humans to read given that we can see the whole line, but very hard to write a parser for. The syntax actually allows a great deal more expression than most programmers ever use, but the parser really has to accept all of it.
C++ really requires a stronger parsing method: LR(k). I now recommend that people look at Elkhound if they want to parse C++ and don't want to use an available parser.
What I should have done was to use Visual C++'s CL and BSCMAKE tools to generate the source browser files and then use the Browser Toolkit to interpret the BSC file, and generate diagrams from that. But I don't think I knew it existed at the time.
