Wireshark work around for Windows 7

I do a fair amount of programming at the socket level and Wireshark is one the tools that I use to test the data going over the wire.  Wireshark is a free application that analyzes packets going across the network.  It knows about the different protocols and can display the data with a nice GUI front end.  It’s a cross platform tool, and I hit a small snag when I went to Windows 7.

To capture the packets, Wireshark uses pcap, which is an API for capturing network data.  Unix/Linux systems use a libpcap library, Windows uses WinPcap.  When you install Wireshark under WIndows, the installer checks to see if WinPcap is installed and if it’s not, it runs a bundled installer for the latest version of WinPCap.

When I installed Wireshark on my Windows 7 box, the installer was unable to install WinPCap.  It displayed the following error message:

This version of Windows is not supported by WinPcap 4.1 beta5.

Oh, the joy of using a new version of Windows.  There is a work around.  Download the WinPcap installer from here and install it first.  When you install it, run it in Vista compatibility mode. 

1. With Explorer, Right-click on the installer and select “Troubleshoot compatibility”.  This will bring up the “Program Compatibility” dialog.
2. Select the second option, “Troubleshoot program”.
3. Under “What problems do you notice”, select the first checkbox, “The program worked in earlier versions of WIndows but wont install or run now”.  Then press the “Next” button.
4. Under “Which version of Windows did this program work on before?”, select “Windows Vista”.  Press the “Next” button.
5. Under “Test compatibility settings for the program”, press the “Start the program…” button.  This should allow you to install WinPCap.
6. After the installer has completed, press the “Next” button on the “Test compatibility settings for the program” dialog.
7. On the “Troubleshooting has completed. Is the problem fixed?” page,  select “Yes, save these setting for this program” to close out the “Program Compatibility” dialog

At this point, you should have WinPcap successfully installed and you can now run the Wireshark installer.  The Wireshark installer will detected that WinPCap is already in place and you can complete the install.

Blocking spam that appears to come from your own email address

At work, I get a lot of email where the sender has spoofed the email address so that it appears to come my work email address.  It’s annoying and our corporate email filter doesn’t catch it.  I did find a way to block it with a close to 100% success rate.  What I did was to create an email filter in the email application that traps those messages.  I’m using Outlook 2007, but the technique should would work for any email client that has decent filtering.  Here’s how I created the rule (using an obviously fake email address of a known spammer):

1.       From the Tools menu, select “Rules and Alerts…”

2.       From the “Rules and Alerts…” dialog, press the  “New Rule…” button.

3.       Under “Start from a blank rule” section, select “Check messages when they arrive” template.

4.       Under the dialog for “Which condition(s) do you want to check?”, select "with specific words in the message header"

5.       Click on “specific words” to open the dialog box that allows you to enter the search criteria.  I entered the following list, you would enter what matches your junk email and each line is entered in separately:
X-Barracuda-Envelope-From: sanford.wallace@spamking.com

From: <sanford.wallace@spamking.com>

6.       After closing this dialog, press “Next”

7.       On the “What do you want to do with the message?” dialog, select the following actions:
mark it as read

clear the Message Flag

move it the specified folder

8.       Click on "specified" and select the "Junk E-mail" folder.

9.       Click the “Next” button to the Finish rule setup dialog.

10.   Name the rule and set "Turn on this rule".  There is also a checkbox “Run this rule on messages already in “Inbox”.  You can set that checkbox to test the new rule.  If you have lots of messages in your inbox, create a new folder and copy some of the spam into that folder.  Then select that folder and edit the rule.  The “Run this rule…” checkbox will now list the name of the selected mail folder.  Your rule will run much faster on a mail folder with just a few times in it.

 

As you edit the settings, Outlook will display a text representation of the rule as you configure it.  It should look something like this:

Apply this rule after the message arrives
with ‘X-Barracuda-Envelope-From: sanford.wallace@spamking.com or From: <sanford.wallace@spamking.com>‘ in the message header
clear the message flag
  and move it to the Junk E-Mail folder
  and mark it as read

You may need to tweak the rule a bit to match the right messages, but it’s fairly robust.  If you want to allow email from your own address, add an exception to the rule and have the exception match some specific text in your message header or your email signature.

When Page Up and Page Down behave oddly in FireFox

I was viewing a web page with Firefox 3.5.2 the other day and I noticed the Page Up and Page Down keys were not behaving the right way.  Instead of scrolling, the page would flash a bit, but nothing really would happen.  I could still scroll with the mouse, but it bugged me.  Bugged me a lot.

I did a bit of searching and discovered an odd little feature.  Select “Options…” from the “Tools” menu.  On the “Advanced tab”, select “General”.  There is an option, “Always use the cursor keys to navigate within pages”.  If that option is set, the cursor keys can be used to select text on the page instead of navigating the page.

By default, that option is not set.  However, you can toggle it on and off by pressing the F7 key.  And I must have pressed that key at some point and toggled that feature on.  Once I cleared that setting, I could use the Page Up and Page Down keys to navigate the page again.

Looking forward to Delphi 2010

I just got the email from Embarcadero with the access code to get my copy of RAD Studio 2010.  Almost all of our products that are Delphi based are compiled with Delphi 2007, I’m looking forward to working with 2010 flavor of Delphi.  We do a lot of .NET development, but there is still a need for WIn32 code and Delphi has been a really good development platform for us. 

I’ve had a software assurance contract since Delphi 7.  I don’t jump to next compiler just to get the next compiler, but I do want the new version to be able to evaluate the new version and see if the benefits out weigh the cost of porting to that version.  We chose not to use Delphi 2009.  We had just completed a painful upgrade to Delphi 2006 from Delphi 5 the year before.  The Delphi 7 port was easy because it supported Delphi 2006 components, but Delphi 2009 would have been major undertaking.  We still face the same porting challenges with Delphi 2010, but I still want to evaluate it and that port/no port decision.

Of course the fun part is waiting for the 3rd party vendors to release their updated controls.  We use a fair number of 3rd party packages.  The biggest ones are DevExpress, ReportBuilder, and JEDI.  DevExpress already put out a notice that they are a few days away from a release that will support RAD Studio 2010.  I’ll be able to do a lot more testing with.  There is no new information from Digital Metaphors about an update to ReportBuilder, but I would expect it fairly soon.  The roadmap page for the JEDI VCL shows that they intend on supporting Delphi 2010, but only sometime in 2009.  My guess would be that any component pack that supports Delphi 2009 should be fairly easy to port to Delphi 2010.

We have a fair number of components that have been either abandoned by the developer or we chose to keep at a specific version.  Those components, I had ported to Delphi 2006/2007 back a few years ago.  Delphi 2009 was a big change and it will probably take more work, but it shouldn’t be that bad.  I may make the decision to drop some of the lesser used components and replace them with equivalent components from DevExpress or JEDI.  We use Abbrevia library that was open sourced by TurboPower when they exited the market.  It has a Delphi 2009 port, that should be an easy one to port to Delphi 2010.

I haven’t seen gas that cheap since the Carter administration

Our local supermarket chain, Price Chopper, has been running a promotion this summer in combination with Sunoco.  The more you spend, the greater the discount will be on your next gas fill up.

This is how it works: For every $50 you spend, you earn 10¢ off per gallon of gas on the next fill up.  The nice thing is that they track all that you are spending.  If you spend $75.00, you get a 10¢ discount on the first $50.00 that you spent, plus you have $25.00 towards the next discount level.  When you get the fill up, the discount maxes out at 20 gallons, so you can’t take your fleet of Brunomobiles and fill them up in one shot.  But it can add up.  If you are paying by credit card, you just have to swipe your AdvantEdge card before you start pumping gas.  If you pay by cash, you just let them swipe the card at the time of payment.

I had been racking up the discount points this summer without paying too much attention to it.  A couple of weeks ago, I stopped into Price Chopper and bought some ice for a party. My current discount was printed on the receipt and it was $2.20 per gallon.  Some of the discount was due to expire at the end of the month, so it was time to cash in.  The discounts expire two months after they are earned, so it was use it or lose it.

The Stewart’s near my house sells Sunoco gas and the receipt here shows how much I paid to fill up my tank.  I paid 59.9¢ a gallon.  I paid a little bit over $8 to fill up a car.  That was just stunning.  That price takes us back to the year 1977.  On a side note: if you factor in the inflation rate, that price in 1977 is not that far off from what we are paying today.

Now I’m back to 0 on the discount, but since we usually buy all of our groceries at Price Chopper, it shouldn’t take too long to get that discount back up.  I don’t know how long they will be running this promotion, but it’s a pretty good one.

Why it can be good to build a PC instead of buying a prebuilt one.

After installing Windows 7, I wanted to install Windows Virtual PC.  Windows Virtual PC requires that your machine support hardware virtualization.  My home development machine is about two years old and I wasn’t sure it it support hardware virtualization.  I have an AMD X2 64 4800 with an Asus MSI-SLI Deluxe motherboard.  With AMD, the virtualization technology is called “AMD-V’.

AMD provides a tool that will tell you if your machine supports AMD-V.  I downloaded and ran it.  It gave me a message that my motherboard needed a BIOS patch to enable AMD-V.  On surface simple enough, patch the motherboard and off you go. 

I was hesitant on flashing the motherboard with a patch.  My motherboard’s BIOS was working just fine and there is some risk involved with flashing the BIOS to a new version.  If something goes wrong during the flash process, you can brick the motherboard.  Or you could find out the new BIOS makes your system worse.  Plus, I had no idea if a new version actually would enabled AMD-V.

Fortunately, Asus has a decent support forum and I was able to post a message asking about hardware virtualization.  Within an hour, I received a detailed response that the new BIOS versions did enable hardware virtualization and a list of steps on how to flash the BIOS.  I’ve flashed motherboard BIOS or two before and I pretty much know that drill, but it’s nice to get that level of support.  He did recommend clearing out the existing BIOS settings, which is always a good thing to do whenever you update the firmware of an electronic device.

I grabbed the latest BIOS from the Asus site.  I also grabbed the current version, just in case something went wrong wrong and I needed to go back to the old BIOS.  My motherboard had a flash tool built it and it could access a USB thumb drive before the booting the OS.  I copied the BIOS files to the thumb drive and rebooted. 

As it booted up, I pressed the Delete key to jump into the BIOS setup screen.  I selected the flash utility and picked the current BIOS file.  After a few minutes, the new BIOS was installed.  I cleared out the CMOS settings for the BIOS and rebooted.  I went into the BISO setup again and a had a few new options.  One of which was AMD Virtualization, which was enabled by default.

The next step was a reboot.  Windows came up and all was good.  I ran the AMD tool and it said that AMD Virtualization was good.  That was pretty painless.  When I got this machine 2 years ago, I had it built from a hand picked list of components.  I’ve had good luck with Asus motherboards and I wanted one where it would be easy to update and upgrade.  Plus I wanted a decent power supply.  When you buy an off the shelf PC, you don’t get to pick the components, other than the capacity and number of items. 

I used to do the actual assembly, but I’ve found it easier to have it assembled by the place where I buy it from.  That way they can make sure that all of the parts fit together and nothing is missing.  If something is DOA, they’ll find it when they assemble and test the system.

Using uberOptions to extend the functionality of Logitech devices

A few weeks ago, I picked up some Logitech mice that were on sale as “dented box” items on the Logitech site.  They were new mice, but their boxes had some minor damage and they were half off.  I grabbed a VX Revolution and a MX Revolution.  The VX was for the family computer that the kids use, and the MX was for my home development machine.  The VX is a notebook model and it’s smaller size fits the kids hands quite nicely.

The MX Revolution was to replace my MX 700 mouse that I’ve had a few years. The 700 was one of the best mice I have ever used, but I had some issues with it.  First off, Logitech did not provide Vista drivers for it. While it worked just fine with Vista, it was only as a standard mouse and the extra buttons could not be used.  The other problem was that the rechargeable batteries had worn out to the point there they would only last for a few minutes.  I could easily find replacement batteries, but I missed the extra functionality of the 700.  Plus I wanted a mouse where the mouse wheel with the “tilt” support for left/right scrolling.

From time to time, Logitech runs “dented box” sales on various products.  If you have right coupon code, you can get a new product with a full warranty.  If you use the site techbargains.com, type “dented logitech” into the search box on the main page, you’ll get a list of the current dented box specials on the Logitech site, plus coupon codes for additional savings.

Both the VX and MX Revolution mice have a little button located just south of the scroll wheel.  By default, it’s mapped to a search function.  Select a word, press the button, and a new browser instance is launched with the selected word passed the search engine.  For some people that may be a cool feature, but I found it just maddening.  With the Logitech SetPoint software that comes with each mouse, you can reassign the mouse button functionality to other behavior.  On the VX, I was able to set the search button to be a middle click button.  I like being able to middle click a link on a web site and get that link opened in a new tab, leaving the existing web page right it I was reading it.

You would think that you could do the same thing with the MX Revolution as you could with the VX Revolution. Oddly enough, while you could assign the middle click function to many of the buttons on the MX, it was not an option for the search button.  I don’t know if that was by design or by error, but it was irritating.  Since the SetPoint configuration software is bundled with all of the current Logitech input devices, the button definitions are not hard coded into the application, but must be read from some set of configuration files.  If I could find where they are located, I should be able to copy the missing MX definitions from the VX settings.

I went on to Logitech’s support forums in search of tips for locating and editing the SetPoint files.  After doing some searching, I found references to something called uberOptions. Rich Owens put together a package called uberOptions, a new set of SetPoint configuration files that greatly expand the options that you can assign to the buttons.  He has modified the files for a large list of keyboards, mice, and trackballs.  The current list of devices plus the installer for uberOptions can be found at http://uberoptions.net/.  It installed and worked just fine with WIndows 7 64 bit.  After I installed it, his default setting for mouse had mapped the search button to the middle click function.  Well played Rich, well played indeed.

[Edited on 8/31/2009]
If Rich Owens’ main site is down, he has a mirror site.

[Edited on 9/8/2009]
Richard Owens sent in an updated link to his site, http://uberoptions.net/, this replaces http://www.mstarmetro.net/users/rlowens/.

Offload TCP processing to the network controllers under Vista, Server 2008, and Windows 7

After upgrading my home PC to Windows 7, I was decided to see if my motherboard/CPU combination support hardware virtualization.  You need hardware virtualization support if you want to run Windows XP Mode or Windows Virtual PC.  I have an XMD Athlon X2 with an Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe and I’m not sure if that combination supports hardware virtualization.  I’m pretty sure the CPU does, but I don’t yet yet know about the motherboard.

I decided to check the  Asus support forum to see that motherboard supports hardware virtualization and while reading through the forum, I found an a post about tweaking the network settings for a boost in performance.  The TCP/IP stack in Vista has the ability to offload some of the network processing to the network controller, if the network controller has that capability.  Out of the box, Vista disables that feature to prevent problems with controllers that don’t support that feature.

From what was posted in the Asus forum, this motherboard does support that feature.  This motherboard is based on the NVIDIA nForce 570 chipset, which included dual Gigabit LAN controllers.  If you are doing CPU intensive tasks, you can gain some performance benefit by offloading the TCP processing to the network controllers.

Vista refers to this setting as the “Chimney Offload State”.  It’s easy to check and set this value.  if you have a newish motherboard with a Gigabit speed network controller, this should work for you.

To change this setting, do the following:

1. Open an elevated command prompt.  Either right-click cmd.exe and select “Run as Administrator” or press the Start button, type “cmd” and then hold the left shift and left control keys while pressing the enter key.
2. Check the current status of the Chimney Offload state by running the following command:
   netsh int tcp show global
   The possible values for that state are: disabled, enabled, default
3. Run the following command to enable Chimney Offload state
   netsh int tcp set global chimney=enable

Before making the changes, check your current broadband speed.  I like the one at speedtest.net, but the others are fine.  Then after making the change, check it again.  If the performance takes a hit, set the state back to it’s original value.  Not only did it work for me, I did get a slight, but measurable, download speed increase.

Before enabling Chimney Offload:

After:

These tests were run a few times before and after the modification.  I picked the average score each time.  That helps even out any existing network traffic that would affect the results.  Going from 17.42 MB/s to 18.70 wasn’t a huge increase, about 7%; but I’ll take it.  There are other settings that you can tweak.  Some are mentioned in the forum posting, and they are also documented in an article in speedguide.net as well.  You don’t often get a free lunch, this is a good one to take.  This setting works for Vista, Server 2008, and Windows 7.  I still don’t know if I can get hardware virtualization, but this was an interesting diversion.

[edited on 8/24/09]
As it turns out, my CPU and motherboard do support hardware virtualization, it just took a little work.

A work around for Delphi 2007/2009 with Windows 7 64 bit

I just installed Windows 7, 64 bit edition so that I could code and test against this new operating system.  Visual Studio 2008 installed and ran without any incident, but I hit a snag with Delphi 2007.  Delphi 2007 installed just fine, but it would die when you ended a debugging session.  An assert error would get thrown and after you cleared the dialog, Delphi would be terminated.
The error was thrown by bordbk105N.dll and had the following text:

Assertion failure: "(!"SetThreadContext failed")"
in ..\win32src\thread32.cpp at line 412
Continue execution?

That was followed by a “Yes/No” set of buttons.  It didn’t matter which choice you made, it was pretty much game over for Delphi at this point. After getting this happen 3 times in a row (even with Delphi launched with “Run As Administrator”), I decided to check the Internet and see if this was unique to me and if there was a fix.
I checked Google and found a few hits.  One of them led me to a blog written by Olaf Monien, a German developer with close ties to the Delphi R & D department.  His post, “Delphi 2009 / Windows 7 / 64 bit Debugger Crash Workaround”, described the issue in great detail.  Apparently an incorrect call is being made to the SetThreadContext API call.  The debugger dll has an assert call based on the return value SetThreadContext().  It’s odd that production code went out with asserts enable, that’s usually used during testing.  Some people traced through the debugger code and found that if a single byte is changed in the dll, you could get by this error.  This byte changes the logic so it ignores the return code from SetThreadContext() and never hits the assert code.  You can read about how they came up with that idea here.
An enterprising programmer named “LordByte” wrote a handy little utility that will patch the debugger dll for both Delphi 2007 and Delphi 2009.  Olaf is hosting the patch tool on his blog and This file found a permanent home at Embarcadero and you can download it from Delphi_2007_2009_WOW64_Debugger_Fix.zip.  This works but you now have the added risk of actual errors being returned from that call to SetThreadContext() being ignored.  Since the alternative is an unusable Delphi, it’s a risk I’m going to have to take.

[Edited April 22nd, 2013]
While I no longer use Delphi, I hate to see a broken link.  I updated the download link for the debugger patch to it's current home at Embarcadero.

When installing apps in a Terminal Server or Citrix environment

When you install an application on a Windows Server running Terminal Services or a Citrix server, the user should go into Add/Remove programs and run the installer through “Add New Programs”.  It sounds clunky, but there is a reason for this.  Microsoft virtualizes the location of the Windows directory under terminal services.  Each user has a private copy of the Windows folder.  This allows applications that assume they are the only user to see only their own copy of the folder.

If an application calls GetWindowsDirectory(), you usually C:\WINDOWS or C:\WINNT.  Under Terminal Services, a call the GetWindowsDirectory will return something like C:\Documents and Settings\currentusername\Windows.  If you need to install a shared component in a folder off of the Windows folder, then you will not want the virtualized folder.  You want to use the actual C:\WINDOWS folder.

Installer authoring tools like InstallAware use GetWindowsDirectory().  This is by design, in a multi-user environment, you want to make sure that the users don’t installed components that could adversely affect other users.  If you want to get the actual Windows directory, you can call GetSystemWindowsDirectory(), it will return the actual Windows directory.  When you run the installer through “Add New Programs”, Terminal Services is place into install mode and GetWindowsDirectory will return the actual directory instead of the virtualized directory.

If your installer requires that you have the correct folder for the GetWindowsDirectory, I would suggest comparing the results of GetWindowsDirectory and GetSystemWindowsDirectory.  if they do not evaluate to the same folder, then you know that you are running under Terminal Services and that Terminal Services is not in install mode.  At the point, you can display a dialog and suggest to the user to run the installer under “Add New Programs” and then exit gracefully.

Facebook does not need a “dislike” button

With just about everything you get to see view in Facebook, there’s usually a button or a link displayed as “like” associated with the topic.  If you click that button, the person who posted that link gets a little note on his Facebook page that you liked what ever it was that they had put up.

When I first saw the ‘like” button, the first thing I thought of was my TiVo remote with it’s “Thumbs Up” and “Thumbs Down” buttons.  You can thumb up or down a program while you are watching it.  This information gets stored on the TiVo and it uses that information to pick shows it think you might like to watch.  A completely optional feature, but very cool none the less.

With the TiVo ‘Thumbs Down” feature in mind, I wondered why there wasn’t a “dislike” button.  If you believe in Sturgeon’s Law (ninety percent of everything is crap), then there is going to be stuff on Facebook that you won’t like.  Since they let you express your approval with the “like' button, why not be able to express your disapproval?

I’m not the only one who has wondered about that.  There’s at least one poll on Facebook that asks “Should Facebook get a dislike button?”  if you have a Facebook account, you can hit that poll from this link.  I saw it because a friend of mine had already voted “Yes”.

Voting “Yes” was my initial inclination, but I decided to think about it for minute.  The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it would be a bad idea to have a “dislike” button.  It would be a tool for expressing a negative opinion and that’s not what Facebook is about.

A large part of the early appeal of Facebook was that it was closed community.  If you want to see someone’s Facebook page, you had to be a member of Facebook and probably need to be a “friend” as Facebook defines it) of that person before being able to view that page. 

Since you have to have a Facebook account to access Facebook user pages, there are no anonymous users on Facebook.  If the Facebook administrators catch you using a fake name (like the way a certain B-List actress did last winter), they will disable the account.  What ever you do on Facebook, it will always be associated with your account.

If you could click a “dislike” button for something that a friend had posted, your friend is going to know you didn’t like what they had posted.  No one is going to want to see a little thumbs down image next to the picture of their new kitten/cat/tattoo/etc.  There will be a percentage of users who will be offended when their post is disliked.  That can lead to bad feelings between the two people and add a negative tone to the Facebook experience.

If you feel strongly against something, you can still leave a comment and express your opinion.  That can actually be helpful.  If you wanted to press the “dislike” button on something because you found it inaccurate or offensive, you can actually write why you feel that way.  Constructive criticism means a lot more than a little image of thumb pointing down.  Some people will still be offended by critical posts, but now you will have a starting point to discuss it.  So I’m not taking that poll and I’m hoping that Facebook doesn’t implement a “dislike” feature.

Checking to see Microsoft Report Viewer 2008 SP1 has been installed

We are updating the installer for one of our applications and that app now requires the Microsoft Report Viewer 2008 Service Pack 1 to be installed first.  The fun part is determining if it’s installed or not.  Usually, I check the registry keys to see if an application is installed.  If the user has installed the Report Viewer as a separate application, you’ll find it under the key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Microsoft Report Viewer Redistributable 2008 SP1. 

If you want to read a value from that key, look for VersionMajor.  It should be a DWORD value of 1.

Of course that’s not the only way to get Report Viewer SP1 installed.  If you have Visual Studio 2008 and you have applied SP1, then you’ll have Report Viewer SP1 as part of the Service Pack.  Under that scenario, you wont have the “Microsoft Report Viewer Redistributable 2008 SP1” key. 

What you need to do is to check to see if VS 2008 SP1 is installed.  That key is located at

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\InstalledProducts\KB945140. 

If you want to read a value for that key, look for string value for “PID”.

[Update on 6/16]

From the home office in Latham, NY, a reader sent in the suggested to also check the registry for 64 bit based machines.  On 64-bit editions of Windows, the Report Viewer Redistributable runs in 32-bit more.  It sees a virtualized version of the registry.  The actual registry location is

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Microsoft Report Viewer Redistributable 2008 SP1

Note the “Wow6432Node”, that tells that it’s a 32 bit application installed on a 64 bit OS.

If this isn’t the first sign of the apocalypse, nothing is. (Jon & Kate & American Chopper)

A few months back, I posted this as a joke.  Now I’m seeing pictures like this floating across the Internet:

It looks like Kate is riding off with Paul Senior and she’s the only one that looks happy.  I think it was for some TLC promotion, not an actual episode of either one of their shows.

Tag your junk mail before it gets sent to you.

Even though we live in the world of tomorrow, we still get junk mail.  The old fashioned kind made of out paper and stuff like that.  Junk email annoys me, but physical junk mail is just a waste of physical resources.   I try to prevent junk mail from being sent at all, but sometimes it still comes in.  What seems to invariably happen is that I’ll get junk mail from some company that I have not had a prior relationship with.  They probably bought my contact information from some other company.

I came up with a little trick to make that mail easy identifiable so that it can be recycled without ever having to open up.  Whenever I register for something online and it asks for my title, I put in “Disposable”.  When that mail comes in and my title is printed on it, when I see the work “Disposable” on it, I know I don’t have to spend any time on it.  At our office, the receptionist delivers all the mail.  I’ve told her that if something comes in for me and it has “Disposable” printed below my name, she doesn’t have to bring it to me.

A followup to my post about SC Johnson not manning a customer hotline.

A few days ago, I posted about my experience trying to get a hold of customer support after my dog ate some ant bait.  SC Johnson has a contract with a health and safety clearinghouse that is manned 24/7.  I have spoken to those people and they are very professional.  Their phone number is not listed on the ant traps.  The number that is listed, goes directly to SC Johnson.  When I called that number, I got a recorded messaged that they were closed and to call back Monday through Friday, between the hours of 8am and 6pm (CST).  That’s all I remembered hearing when I called that number.  When I called SC Johnson on Tuesday, they insisted that the emergency contact number was on the message.  I don’t remember hearing that at all.

I received a call today from a physician from the Health and Safety hotline.  He had been contacted by SC Johnson after someone had read my blog posting.  They asked him to clarify with me that the SC Johnson hotline did list the emergency number.  I thought that was pretty odd as the clearing house was not responsible for the SC Johnson hotline.

I am willing to concede that an emergency number may have been at the end of the message.  If it was on the message, it did not play soon enough and I thought the call was over.  I still maintain that the number for the Health and Safety hotline should have been printed on the ant bait station and on SC Johnson’s product web page for the ant bait.  For this particular bait station, the dosage of the poison was below the level to cause any ill effects with my dog.  If I had a smaller dog (or puppy) and that dog had eaten all of the bait traps, there could have been a problem.

If you sell poison, I think your customer hotline should be manned 24/7

A couple of weeks ago, we had some unwanted visitors coming in from under the front door.  Pavement ants.  You know, Tetramorium caespitum.  They are tiny and they come from under the door frame.  It usually happens every year at about this time.  I usually spray around the outside of the house with a pesticide and the problem goes away.

This year, that didn’t work.  I did some research online and found that spraying outside was needed, but only part of the treatment.  Another part was to put down ant bait traps indoors, near where they come in.  They provide a poison that the ants take back to nest, eliminating the source of the problem.  That was a bit overkill, but the since ants were not taking the hint it was time to take it up a notch.

Last Sunday I went to the local lawn and garden shop and bought some Raid® Double Control Ant Baits.  The bait stations were very effective.  After placing the four bait stations near my door, the was a surge in ant activity (“treats for us?”) around the bait stations.  After a couple of days, the ant activity dropped down to nearly zero.

We left the bait stations at the door all week.  On Wednesday, one of the bait stations disappeared.  For some reason, that didn’t trip the alarm circuit in the back of my head.  Ant traps typically don’t move by them selves.  I figured that the housekeeper had vacuumed one of them up.  That was my mistake, I should have paid more attention to this.

Cut to Saturday.  I was mowing the lawn when Anne ran out to get my attention.  I shut off the mower and she said that the dog had just tried to eat one of the ant traps.  She had grabbed it from her before the dog could ingest the contents of the trap, but we now knew where the other trap had gone.

Now we had to figure out what to do with the dog.  She’s a 60lb Lab, so she’s a good size.  Still, poison is not a recommended part of her diet.  I grabbed one of the remaining bait stations and flipped it over.  It had a 800 number to call as the customer hotline.  So I called the number and received a recorded message that they were closed and to call back on Monday during business hours.

This is poison, you can’t have a consumer hotline that is only available during regular business hours.  What if It had been a toddler that ingested the poison bait?  I knew that I could call an emergency animal hospital over in Latham, but I decided to do some basic research on the Internet first.

The active ingredient of the bait station was something called “Avermectin B1”.  I searched “avermectin” and discovered that dogs find it tasty and this problem occurs more often than you would expect.  I found numerous pages like the following:

Thanks for the advice! I called the e-vet and they gave me poison control numbers. I called them and because the active ingredient in the spikes are 0.05% avermectin, which according to them is only poisonous if he were to consume 30 of the spikes. The biggest concern they said was the plastic. Thankfully, Wally didn't eat the plastic part.

That was from a Labrador chat board called “Labrador Retriever Dogs Chat Forum Board”.   You figure that the ant spike would be the same amount of poison, if not not more than the bait station.  Apparently Avermectin is commonly used to treat fleas and worms on dogs and small doses will not harm the dog.  In fact, that’s one of ingredients for heartworm pills.

We were a lot calmer after reading a few pages with the same stuff.  After three days since the last “tasty treat”, the dog is showing no signs of illness.   We just know now that we can’t put out bait stations anymore.

I’m not terribly thrilled with the SC Johnson company.  If you sell a chemical that is designed to kill other creatures, you should have a 24/7/365 support line.  It doesn’t have to be monitored by humans all the time.  A properly designed phone tree (“Press 1 if a pet ingested a Raid® Double Control Ant Bait”) would have helped.  At the very least, we would have know than the dog was not in serious danger and we would not have to induce vomiting. 

If you call during business hours, you do get a phone tree before you get a human.  I called this morning to find out why this product doesn’t have a hotline on the week end.  I was told that there is a 24/7 Health and Safety hot line and that number is (866) 231-5406.  It’s not run by SC Johnson, it’s a clearing house for emergency information. 

Because of the toxicity of the bait station, SC Johnson is not required by law to have that number anywhere on the packaging.  That’s just wrong.  When your pet (or a child for that matter) eats some poison, you need to find out how toxic it is immediately.   You would think that number would be on the home page for the bait stations, but it’s not.  I was able to use Google to search the SC Johnson site afterwards and I found it on their Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) home page.

At any rate, the ants are gone and the dog is still here.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do if this happens next year.  It would be really nice if they came out with ant bait that dogs would not eat.  I doubt that would happen as there are very few things that a dog wont eat.

Remembering Alivia Lovell

Last October, our company constructed 8 playhouses that were donated to some patients at the Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Disorders at Albany Medical Center.  We do something like that every year.  It’s partly a team building exercise and partly a way a way to give back something to the community.  We put them together at the New Scotland Armory, across from the AMC.  Later on they were delivered to the homes, courtesy of Bennett Contracting.

While we were assembling the playhouses, the children were brought in to see the playhouses.  It was a pretty emotional scene for all of us.  I remember one little girl, cute as button. She was very shy and but she was excited about getting a new playhouse.  We just found out that Alivia Lowell passed away from leukemia last week at the age of 4.

(click on the picture for more information about Alivia)

My heart goes out to the Lovell family.

Natasha Richardson

I was shocked when I first heard about the tragic accident that took the life of Natasha Richardson.  I am finding it hard to accept that a small fall could cause a fatal brain injury.  While the privacy of her family out weighs everything else, I do hope that they announce the results of her autopsy. 

There haven’t been any details about the accident itself.  I wonder how much force was involved.  I can remember two other high profile skiing accidents that involved fatal brain injuries.  There was Michael Kennedy’s fatal collision with a tree on the slopes of Aspen, back in December of 1997.  That was followed by Sonny Bono’s tragic death a week later under similar circumstances.  Speed does kill, a helmet could saved their lives.

I’m wondering if Richardson had a pre-existing condition.  She could have had a brain aneurysm.  That could have triggered the fall, or more likely, the fall made the aneurysm worse.  My father had a brain aneurysm once and he had many of the same symptoms that Richardson had reported.  He was lucky, surgeons were able to clamp the aneurysm before it caused any permanent damage to his brain.  With Natasha Richardson, a blood vessel that was already leaking started opening up after the fall and by the time they got her to the hospital it was already too late.  My heart goes out to her sons and her husband, this is a a tragic loss.

What to do before your camera is stolen

I just read about a guy in Poland who bought a camera on an on-line auction and it came with a memory card with someone’s travel pictures. He figured that the camera had been or lost or stolen. Based on a picture, he guessed the owner was from Australia.  So he registered as a new member on a Australian photography web forum and solicited the members for help. 

With a little bit of sleuthing, they tracked down the owners and sent them their pictures.  The last few postings on the forum indicated that he was trying to get his money back from the auction site so that he could send the camera to it’s rightful owners.  You can read the full message thread here.  It’s a great story about how good people can be.

If I ever lose a camera, I hope that happens to me.  I would pay a reward to one back.  If not the camera, at least the memory card.  You can always get another camera, but you will never get back the memories that were recorded by that camera.   One that you can do is place a file on your memory card that would provide your contact information in case someone comes across your card.

Just create a text file with a file name of something like “If found.txt” and with add something like the following text:

This memory card was from a camera that was lost or stolen.  I will pay a reward and cover the costs of shipping to get this memory card back, with no questions asked.  Please mail the card to this address:

John Smith
123 Main St
Springfield, NY 12345
USA

If you include a return address, I will send a money order to cover the cost of shipping and for your time. If you would prefer alternative arrangements you can email me at someaddress@something.com

thank you

It’s simple enough to do and it could get you pictures back if you lose camera on vacation.

Getting back the Ctrl-N shortcut with SQL Server 2008’s SSMS

After I installed SQL Server 2008, I noticed that the Ctrl-N keyboard shortcut in the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) no longer worked.  What it’s supposed to do is to open up a new query tab.  In my install of SSMS 2008, the Ctrl-N key did nothing.  Pressing Ctrl-N was burned into my brain. It was a serious context switch for me to have to select a menu item or press a button to get a new query tab. 

A friend of mine gave me a simple tip that fixed it.  Change the keyboard layout to “SQL Server 2000” and then back to “Standard” and that will restore the default keyboard mappings.  That fixed it and I belatedly found it documented here, here and here.  I don’t know why I didn’t check the series of tubes for the answer, it was pretty obvious how to fix it.

To change the keyboard mappings, select Tools->Options from the SSMS menu and then go to Environment->Keyboard.  From that spot, you can change the keyboard layout.  Change the layout and press the “Ok” button to save the changes.  Then, repeat the steps and select the standard layout and press “Ok” again.  That will set the default keyboard mappings, which will include the Ctrl-N mapping.

And the Chess King is gone

2009 Me: And by 1995, the last Chess King had closed it’s doors for good.

1979 Me: And you thought that was a bad thing?

2009 Me: Well, it was a store that was around back in 1979.  It was once of those places we would have to walk by on the way out of the mall.

1979 Me: I didn’t shop there.  Please, please don’t tell me that I shopped there in the future

2009 Me: No, we never did.  Well, we walked in, and we walked right back out without buying anything.

1979 Me: Thank you.  Or thank me, or us.

2009 Me: But we did go through a phase in the early ‘80s where we wore skinny ties….

Have you had any bizarre IM messages from a person with “coho” in his screen name?

I was moving some Visual Studio projects around when an odd AIM window popped up.  It was from someone named “limbercoho” and the message was “Hail, Fellow”.  I usually close unsolicited AIM messages without even looking at them.  There are other ways to get in tougc with me, I view anything unsolicited from AIM or MSN with more than a little suspicion.

At that momemt, my PC was busy moving files around, so I had a some spare bandwidth and decided to see what was going on.  I responded back with “Hail” and it got a little wierd:

limbercoho: Hail, fellow!
me: Hail
limbercoho: hail?
me: Yes?
limbercoho: hell yes?

It didn’t take long to realize that something was just not right.  Going on the assumption that limberoho was some sort of whack job, I decided to do a Google check on that name.  The second hit was on Nixie Pixel’s blog, List of AIM Fish Bots – Salmon, Coho, and Trout.  There is an organization called “Project Upstream” that created the robotic fishbots.

The fishbot takes two random IM users and sends a greeting to each one and then connects each user to each other user.  They don’t see the other person’s screen name, they see a fishbot generated name like LimberCoho or BakedCoho.  Basically a random word plus “coho”.  Previous incarnations used “Salmon” and “Trout”.

Once I figured out what was going on, I IM’d the link from Nixie’s blog.  Understandably, he responded back with “I’m not going to click that link”.  That made sense, I wouldn’t have clicked a link that a stranger had send me.  So I explained what was going on and he asked how to block it.  That would be the annoying part, you can’t block randomly generated names.  There is an opt-out mechanism, but you wouldn’t know about it unless you knew what was going on.  The Project Upstream site does not mention, but someone claiming to be part of Project Upstream posted the instructions The Missing Hat’s LiveJournal site:

Opt-out support introduced
Greetings, hat missers. We are Project Upstream.

We have chosen to provide you with a new ability. You may now send a message such as "$optout" to any of our robotic fish. This will permanently prevent all Project Upstream communications from reaching your account.

Some additional information can be found on the Wikipedia entry for TheGreatHatsby.  That seems easy, but unless you know how to look for that sort of thing, you’ll never figure it out on your own.  It’s an interesting idea, connecting two complete strangers using social networks.  The flaw is that most people are not going to know anything about Project Upstream and and they are going to think that other person is up to no good.  There should be some information about the project in that opening message.  You could make a new friend, but it’s more likely to freak the other person out.

I chatted with the other person for a few minutes and we exchanged Twitter accounts.  It turns out that we really have nothing in common and we doubt that we will keep in touch.  It’s an interesting experiment and I think I’ll stay in it for a while.

The other thing to remember is that you are not directly connected to the other person.  Your message goes to the fishbot and the fishbot relays that message to the other user.  The same would be true for other user.  That’s great because if you don’t want to have an IM conversation with the other person, that person has no way of making contact with you again. 

That does raise an interesting privacy concern in that the fishbot is monitoring both sides of the conversation.  It needs to do that to relay the conversation and to be able to handle the “$optout” request.  But, what are they doing with that information?  The web site for Project Upstream only tells you how to opt in, there is nothing about privacy issues or how to opt out.  Just remember the security issues if you decide to play with a robotic fish.

On this episode of “Jon and Kate and an American Chopper”…

On this episode of “Jon and Kate and an American Chopper”, Kate and Paul Sr have it out over how dirty the OCC office appears to be.  Jon struggles to find his place at OCC.  Paulie nearly loses his mind when he takes the girls shopping for new shows.  Mikey and Aaden continue to work on their concept bike.

Paul Sr organizes a dodge ball match between the OCC camera crew and the Gosselin camera crew.  Hilarity ensues when Kate shows off her new tattoo and Jon tells her “That’s not the Korean word for love", but it’s kind of similar.”

Resetting the mouse cursor

Some app on my XP development PC left the mouse cursor stuck in the “move” state.  The mouse was behaving correctly, but it was stuck in move image, the one with the four direction arrows.  Normally, the mouse cursor is application specific.  One the apps is coloring outside the lines and the cursor image was stuck for all of the running applications.  I’m using a beta version of a Twitter client app, it’s the obvious suspect, but I still need to prove that.

I couldn’t figure out which app was doing this and I was in the middle of editing some code and I didn’t want to break my concentration by restarting everything.  So I decided to address the symptom and not the problem.  The question is how to do you reset the mouse cursor?

First, I tried the simple solution and just removed the mouse.  It’s plugged into a USB port on my monitor so I just turned off the monitor and turned it back on.  After coming back on, the mouse still had the wrong cursor.  What I did next was to bring up the Mouse applet in the control panel.  I selected the “Pointers” tab and it was obvious that something was a little off.  On this tab, you can select the theme to associate with the nouse cursors and the preview display shows the “move” cursor image for each possible mouse cursor image. 

I selected another theme and then went back to the current theme.  Now the preview showed the correct images.  I clicked the “Apply” button and the mouse was back to normal.  There’s probably a command line for doing this, but I’m not going to spend the cycles looking for it unless this happens again.

Sorry it didn’t work out

My work email inbox had a lot of spam this morning.  The messages were very similar in content with subtle variations in the sender and subject fields.  Nothing unusual there.  The odds are that someone got hit with a virus and my email address was in their address book.  That’s the tax we pay for free transmission of email.  Okay people, move along, there’s nothing to see here.

As collateral damage, I also received an automated error message from someone else’s email server.  That person got spammed from the first guy’s virus and the spam email used my email address as the sender.  Once again, typical tactics.  I usually delete these messages without even looking at them, but the error message caught me eye.  The message contained the following text:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at something.something.something.net.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<somebody@alaska.net>:
qmail-spawn unable to open message. (#4.3.0) I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

--- Below this line is a copy of the message.

Return-Path: <theguywithavirus@yahoo.co.uk>

The email addresses were changed to protect the innocent.  I found that text to be greatly amusing.  I’m working on a some error handling code for one our products and I am going to find a way to work in the text “This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.”.  It’s a subtle bit of humor and for the use case that I working on, entirely appropriate.

Dealing with static electricity during winter

Lately I’ve had bad luck plugging in USB devices into my home development PC. I would go to sync up my Zen (or since Christmas, my iPod Touch) and bad things would happen.  As soon as the USB cable touched the device, the PC would reboot.  I hate it when that happens.  I learned to touch some metal object to ground myself, but that didn’t always work.

It’s pretty dry in my house during winter.  Walking across the carpet, I seem to pick up a critical amount of static electricity.  Oddly enough, the reboot never happened when I sync’ed  my daughters' iPods to the family PC that we all share.  Same dry air, nearly the same carpet.  But different PC hardware.  The family PC is a basic Dell Core Duo box.  Nothing fancy, but good enough. 

My machine is one that I had custom built.  Roughly the same CPU, just the AMD flavor, but with more bells and whistles.  I wanted dual NICs, RAID 5, FireWire, beefier PSU, and a quieter case.  I wrote about that machine a while back, it’s worked out pretty well so far.

It seems that it was the case that’s doing me in.  I’ve been a big fan of Antec cases, and this case is a Sonata II.  Nice design and very easy to work.  It has the extra touches that you would want, like a dust filter in front of the fan that pulls air into the case.  But it appears that that there are grounding issues with the USB connectors on the front panel.  I did a few quick searches through the series of tubes and found way too many hits for “antec sonata usb ground static” to be coincidental.

The obvious solution would be connect a wire to the front panel that has the USB ports and ground it to the case.  That will be a weekend project because the internal drive bays block access to the front panel.  In the meanwhile, I’m taking the lazy way out.  I had a spare 4 port USB hub that Microsoft gave out at DevConnections a few months back and I connected it to one of the USB ports on the motherboard shield at the back of the PC.  Those ports are grounded.  I also an running a vaporizer in my office when I’m working.  I need to get a humidifier, but the vaporizer was handy.

Between those two hacks, the static discharge problem appears to have been eliminated.  I’m not thrilled with Antec at the moment.  These are premium cases (or at least more expensive than the budget cases) and you would think that all of the ports would be grounded.  After skimming through the various message boards about this problem with multiple Antec cases, I wonder this will be my last Antec case.

What to do when an antivirus vendor has flagged your software as a virus

I usually don’t talk about where I work, this is my personal blog and where I work really doesn’t matter to the content of blog posts.  This post is a little different, it’s work related and knowing where I work adds some needed context.  I’m a senior software engineer for Tyler Technologies, in their VersaTrans Solution. The VersaTrans product line provides school transportation software and services for the K-12 schools.

About a month ago, I came into work to find people waiting at my cubical.  That’s usually not a good way to start off a morning, and it wasn’t.  Apparently McAfee pushed out a virus definition file out the night before and it was flagging our software as a trojan.  Two of our executable files were being flagged.  Our customers were calling in to our technical support department, and they were understandably concerned.  The McAfee antivirus software wanted to quarantine our applications.  That would prevent our customers from using our applications, which is not a good thing.  They use our bus routing and planning software on a daily basis.  Not being able to use our software can cause a lot of problems for a school’s transportation department.  We needed to immediately resolve this.  I usually don’t get involved with technical support issues, but I had the bandwidth to immediately jump on this problem.

The immediate order of business was to replicate the actions of the A/V software.  We wanted to make sure that our software was being actually being flagged before we reported it to McAfee.  We don’t use any of the McAfee products in house, so one of our QA specialists (David) started downloading a trial copy of McAfee’s Enterprise solution.  This is the application that our clients were reporting that they were using.  David would install that copy into a virtual machine and test it in an isolated environment.

Thursday, 10:00am.  I decided to save some time and upload a copy of our application to my home PC.  I have a copy of the home version of the McAfee A/V product.  It comes free as part of my FiOs package.  I’ve been planning on removing it and replacing it with one of the free A/V products, but fortunately it was still installed.  Sure enough, the app was flagged as “BackDoor-AWQ.svr.gen.e”, which is some type of generic server type of trojan that was added to version 5460 of the McAfee A/V database.  Version 5460 was the one that had been just pushed out to all of McAfee’s clients.  David would eventually duplicate the A/V hit, but it would take a while.  Armed with immediate proof from my home PC, I could proceed to the next step.  By the way, it can be very handy to be able securely access your home PC from your office PC.

10:15am.  I made my initial call to McAfee.  I went was passed to several CSRs, most of them refused to provide any identification other than their first name.  With each CSR, I was asked for a “grant number”, which was some form of customer identifier.  With each CSR I needed to explain that I was not calling as a McAfee customer, but as a representative of Tyler Technologies and they were false identifying our software as malware.  Each CSR tried to redirect me to their home product support.  With each CSR, I would request to speak with their supervisor when it became obvious that I would not get the support.

10:30am. I spoke with “Mike”, who identified himself as Corporate Service Program Supervisor.  He refused to escalate the issue or provide a last name and phone number.  Once again, I asked to speak to his supervisor.  He did not want to do this and we went back and forth a few times and I was persistent.  He finally transferred me to their Consumer Customer Department and provided that phone number (866-622-3911) with great reluctance.

10:30-10:42am.  Waited on hold.

While I was on hold, our sales department sent out a mass email to all of our clients.  The email explained that McAfee was falsely identifying our application as a virus and they should not be alarmed and that we were working with McAfee to remedy the situation.  As soon as you can reliably identify that some version of your software is being falsely flagged as a virus, contact your customers.  Trust me, they will appreciate it.

10:42am. Spoke to another CSR who couldn’t help resolve the problem, but could transfer me to someone who would be able to help.

10:45-11:00am.  Waited on hold.

11:01-11:30am. I reached a CSR named Juan at the Dallas office of McAfee.  Juan’s title is Tier III Customer Service and he provided me with his direct phone number and email address.  He asked me to submit a copy of the file being flagged to a web site that they provide for online scanning of files.  This is McAfee Avert® Labs WebImmune and is located at https://www.webimmune.net/default.asp.   I registered an account on their site and tried to upload the Routing and Planning (RP) executable known to trigger the McAfee scanner.  I was unable to upload the file because the RP executable is 7.7MB in size and WebImmue would only accept files up to 3MB in size.  Our executable is pre-compressed and there isn’t any other method of shrinking the size down to below 3MB.  This 3MB limitation basically defeats the purpose of having that site.

I then tried emailing the file to Juan, but our own email server blocked the email because of the file attachment.  That’s bad on our part, but there is more than one way to email a file.

11:45am.  I emailed the file to Juan via my personal Hotmail account.  It took a while to make it to Juan, but by 3:00PM, I had an email confirmation from Juan that he had received the file.

11:58am.  I received an email from Juan with the following text:

Mr. Miller,

I just received an email in regards to the issue that you are currently facing.

An issue that was incorrectly indentifying some large applications executables files as Backdoor.awq.svr.gen.e has been resolved.

Attached is an ED to suppress this detection. We have tested the ED against the limited number of files we have received thus far. If the ED doesn't work and DAT 5461 hasn't shipped then please gather a sample (FTP site in pwd protected zip if larger than 3mb) and escalate via MSTeg.

I forwarded the message to David in QA.  David had set up a virtual machine with a trial version of the McAfee Enterprise virus scanner and could duplicate the problem using the 5460 DAT file.  The “ED” supplied by Juan did not fix the problem, but I am not 100% certain that we had installed it correctly.  Their ED file did not come with any instructions on how to install it and we I promptly notified Juan that it was still a problem for us.

3:00pm.  Juan emailed me to notify me that he had received the RP executable from my Hotmail account and he requested a copy of the other executable that was being falsely identified (Ascii Scheduler).  I immediately sent him that file from my Hotmail account.  I did not receive emails from Juan (or any other McAfee representative) after that point.  Both files share about 98% of the same code, I was pretty sure if they fixed the scanner for one of them, it would be fixed for the other.  Especially since we were not the only company affected.  Juan wouldn’t tell me who else had been false identified, but he hinted that they were big companies and they were not happy.

Friday 9:00am.  I was told by our QA Manage that DAT version 5461 was pushed out by McAfee overnight and it no longer flags our files as false positives.  We received many happy emails from clients thanking us for the prompt attention paid to the matter.

So what do you do if this happens to you?  I recommend doing the following when a customer reports that your software is being flagged as a virus:

• Ask the customer for the product name and version number of the antivirus software.  If possible, get the version number and date of the virus database used by the software.  Start taking detailed notes during this process.  You want an audit trail to give your boss to explain where your day went, plus it gives you ammunition when you get stuck with a CSR that wont help your or escalate your call.
• Ask for the name of the virus or trojan that your software is being flagged as.
• Get the version number of your executable that is being flagged as a virus.
• Get a trial version of the A/V software and attempt to duplicate the false positive match.  If you can not duplicate the results, ask the client to send a password encrypted zip archive of the executable being flagged.  You have to consider the possibility that the client’s machine has been infected with a virus and that your application was infected on the client’s machine.  By sending it in a password encrypted zip file, it should pass through the client’s email server and your server without flagging any additional virus checks.
• Submit your executable to the A/V vendors online support.  Most of them have a web page for submitting a questionable file.  You wont get a fast response back, but when you call their support, they will ask you to do this step so you might as well get it out of the way.
• Call the A/V vendor and ask for support.  Do not identify yourself as a customer of their A/V software, but as an ISV who has been falsely identified by their software.  If you identify yourself as a customer, you may get shunted down lower priority support queue.  If you have an expensive support contract, that would be different.  Basically, just use the best tools at your disposal.
• Ask for the CSR’s name and phone number, with extension.  Tell them that you need this information to provide an audit trail for your supervisor.  Be polite but persistent.  If they can not help you, ask for their supervisor and just work your way up their chain of command until you get a CSR that can help you.
• Stay polite and professional with the CSR.  It’s not their fault that their software is falsely identifying your software as a virus.  They are more likely to expedite a remedy if you are not beating up on them.  It’s likely that you are not the only one being affected by this.
• When you have a CSR that can help you, work out a plan with target times for how to resolve this.  Let them know that you will be in phone and email contact with them until the matter is resolved.  Basically, you want to get the file or files to them and have enough time for them to test the files and work out a solution.  You do not want to be waiting for hours just to get them the file.  You will want acknowledgement when they have received the file and when they have duplicated the problem.  Your goal is to get them to issue out a new virus update file on the same day.
• Once you get the problem resolved, send a “thank you” email to the CSR that helped resolve the problem.  If the problem ever occurs again, you want to be able to start with that CSR and not have to waste time going up the CSR tree.

Having to go through all of this was not how I planned on spending my day. I lost the better part of the day dealing with McAfee’s mistake when I could have been working on my own mistakes.  This kind of stuff happens and it’s good to have a plan for dealing with it.

Renabling maintenance plans on SQL Server 2005

We have a couple of SQL Server boxes that we use in our department and of them has some mission critical databases.  Our defect tracking and source control databases are the big ones, but there are a few others.  We back them up and then copy them to a folder on a netwrk share.  From the network share, the files get backup up to tape and are stored offsite.

On the database server, I have a maintenance plan that runs each night and backups the critical databases.  It runs at 2am.  At 5am, I have a scheduled task run on the database server that does the following:

1. Purges the old backups and compresses copies of the backups.
2. Copies the latest backup of each database to a new folder.
3. Compresses the backups using 7-Zip.
4. Compresses our technical spec documents.
5. Backup the MSQL database that has our department’s wiki.  We are a .NET shop, but I really like how the MediaWiki software works, so we use that. Getting that to work a 64-bit Windows Server is a story best left for another day.
6. Copy the compressed backups to the network share.

So that has been working without any hitches for about 12 months.  We did a spot check of the backups last week and noticed that it stopped working a few weeks ago.  After a bit of poking around with how the scheduled task was scheduled, running it manually, and so forth, I ended up at the database server.

I tried to view the maintenance plan that handles the backups and I was presented with the following error message:

'Agent XPs' component is turned off as part of the security configuration for this server. A system administrator can enable the use of 'Agent XPs' by using sp_configure. For more information about enabling 'Agent XPs', see "Surface Area Configuration" in SQL Server Books Online. (ObjectExplorer)

That’s not good.  But easily fixable.  I Google’d the first sentence and found a fix on the first page Enabling "Agent XPs" on SQL 2005 in a post by Jeff Story on the Tree Rat Fishing blog.  In short if you run the following T-SQL commands, you’ll get the functionality back:

sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1;
GO
RECONFIGURE;
GO
sp_configure 'Agent XPs', 1;
GO
RECONFIGURE
GO

I still don’t know what disabled Agent XPs, my guess was a Service Pack update for SQL Server or someone messing around with the server.  I’m thinking of setting up a developer dashboard page to display stuff like when were the database backups done, what projects were built for QA.  Not knowing that the backups were not performed was a giant flaw in the backup plan.  We were lucky on this one.

Dealing with meetings that run late and run into your meeting

Raymond Chen just posted a great post on his The New Old Thing blog about getting people out of a meeting room when their time is up.  You either barge right in and say “Oops! Sorry about that” and then back right out.  Or you just sit right down and apologize for being late for your own meeting.

If you are in a meeting and your time is up, it’s just proper etiquette to end the meeting if that room is booked for another meeting.  While your topic may be more important for the next meeting, making other people wait will push back everyone’s schedule.  It can ripple through the company and come back and bite you on the Blackberry..  It’s just a poor business decision to make everyone else wait.

Either politely ask if the next meeting can be be delayed a few minutes, or just book another meeting at another time to finish your stuff up.  With so many meetings include people calling in for remote offices, you really need to make an effort to keep your meeting on track.

If your one hour status meeting always seems to run 90 minutes, then you have a time management problem.  Either your meeting isn’t staying on topic, or the scope of the meeting doesn’t fit the time allotted.  Cut back on the scope or just book the room for 90 minutes.

At the last place I worked, our daily team staff meetings were “stand up” meetings.  We all stood in a quite away near our workspace, and we just stood and talked for a few minutes.  No beverages were allowed and off topic conversations were verboten.  This fails when you have remote team mates, then you would need to book a small room and everyone just stares at the conference phone.  The no sitting down and no beverage rules are still in effect.

I still think that Dave Barry said it best:

Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.

Some odd TiVo issues

I have  couple a couple of Series2 TiVo DVRs and they just received the TiVo Fall 2008 Service Update for 9.3.2.  It’s basically a few tweaks to the UI, but the odd thing was that I needed to manually restart the TiVo.  Usually the TiVo restarts itself after getting a new system update.  Very odd, but hopefully just a one time glitch.

My in-laws have a TiVO HD and sometime last week it decided to stop recording the shows on the season passes.  I went over and took a look.  The season passes were in order and when you selected view upcoming episodes, the shows would be listed, but not listed as being recorded.  Very odd.  The fix was simple, but annoying.  I selected each season pass and saved it without making any changes.  After saving the pass, the correct shows were marked as going to be recorded.  Fortunately they only had a handful of season passes, it took a minute or two to update all of them. 

After fixing the season passes, I tried to bring up YouTube on the TiVo HD.  When I selected YouTube from the menu, the TiVo froze and stopped responding.  I gave it a few minutes to figure it on it’s own and I restarted their TiVo the hard way.  Thanks to TiVo not having a reset button, I had to unplug and plug it back in again.  After waiting a few minutes to boot abck up, it was back to normal.

That was the first time I have ever had to reboot a TiVo, their software has been very stable.  As with my Series2 units, I’m hoping that this was a one time glitch caused by system updates being pushed down the to TiVo.

Fast way to resize a virtual disk with VMware ESX Server

We’re starting some SharePoint development and I needed to create a development environment on Windows Server 2003.  So I created a new virtual machine (VM) of Server 2003 on our VMware ESX box and gave it a 1GB of RAM and 8GB of disk space.  I installed the OS and configured it for Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and then installed Visual Studio 2008.  That left us with about 1.5GB of disk space.  Oops, time to resize the drive.

The beauty of working with virtual machines is that it’s relatively easy to increase or decrease the memory and disk storage.  In this case, I wanted to add another 4GB to the virtual disk.  I powered down the virtual machine and went into the “Virtual Machine Properties” from the VMware Infrastructure Client (VIC).  I selected the hard drive and it provided a entry field for the new size.  I increased the size to 12GB, adding an additional 4GB.

That takes us part way there.  I increased the size if the virtual disk from 8GB to 12GB, but it still has an 8GB partition, the OS wont see the additional space.  I saw all some tips on that Series of Tubes that recommended downloading Linux boot disks and boot the the VM from the Linux CD images as an .ISO file.

Meh, that’s too much work.  I took a simpler path.  I powered down another Server 2003 VM that was already running on the ESX box and added new VM’s virtual disk as a second virtual drive.  I booted up the second VM and opened up a command shell.  From the command shell, I ran the diskpart utility to extend the partition.  I did the following commands through diskpart:

diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 5.1.3565
          
Copyright (C) 1999-2003 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: XXXXX

DISKPART> list volume
 
  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
  Volume 0     E                       DVD-ROM         0 B
  Volume 1     C                NTFS   Partition     12 GB  Healthy    Boot
  Volume 2     D                NTFS   Partition    8 GB  Healthy

 
 
DISKPART> select volume 2 
  
Volume 2 is the selected volume.
  
DISKPART> extend
 
DISKPART> exit
       
Leaving DiskPart...

I basically typed that in from memory, some of the numbers may be off, but it shows how to extend the size of the partition.  After exiting out of diskpart, I then shut down the second VM.  Next, I removed the virtual drive that belongs to the new VM.  Remember to select remove only and not remove and delete.  At this point I was able to power both VM’s back up.  The second VM will be slightly confused about the missing drive, but it was back to normal.  The new VM took some time to check out the resized partition after I logged back in.  With my VM, it declared it to be new hardware and wanted to reboot.  After it rebooted, it was happy and recognized that it had a 12GB partition.