Following steps walk-through (from my perspective) how I setup a local debug VM (running Windows 7 HP version) and setup WinDBG in the host OS to connect and debug drivers in the VM

• Created a Windows VM in the VMWare Workstation 7.1. Installed Windows 7 HP. VMWare has this cool feature “Easy Install”. All I had to provide was a username and serial number for my Windows. Everything installed with out any further input from me.
• Power off the VM.
• Edit the VM settings. Add a new SERIAL port. Make sure it is connected to a named pipe as shown below.

Notice that “Yield CPU on poll” should be checked. The options below the “Use named pipe” should also be set as shown in the image above.

• Open WinDBG in the host (machine running the VMWare VM). Press CTRL-K to open Kernel Debugging options. Configure it as shown below. Do not PRESS OK yet.

• Power on the VM now. Once it crosses the POST, press OK in the WinDBG dialog box above.
• If everything goes well, you should see WinDBG happily connecting and showing info from target OS (as shown below).

I created a VM snapshot immediately after I made the the initial connection to the VM via WinDBG. This is my golden snapshot and I can anytime revert to this point, if at all anything gets corrupted inside the VM.

One thing I observed is the absence of “+” in the notation window to mark “checks”. Look at the image below (highlighted yellow). Rc1+ was just played and there is no “+” in the notation window….aahhh!

Luckily, I soon found the option to bring back the “+”.

• Click on “Rybka button” (the one with fish picture on it).
• Go to Options > Display Options.

Selecting option 1 (above picture) will bring the beloved “+” back. I usually have options 2 and 3 selected too.

Methinks DeepAquarium should come with this option enabled by default.

After installation, I noticed my Windows server 2008 R2 booted in “Windows classic” mode. This was an eye sore, to say the least, after having used Windows 7′s themes. My machine has GeForce 9500GS along with the proper x64 driver. So I know it is capable of doing Aero. But, Windows “Personalization” option was not allowing me to select any Aero theme.

Quick googling showed me that I was not the first person trying to solve this – Here’s the link I used & found very helpful – http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/01/09/windows-server-2008-r2-beta-aero-enabled-workstation/. Though I had “Desktop experience” feature installed, my “Themes” service was not enabled.

I set it to “Automatic” and started the service. But, still Windows was not allowing me to set the Aero theme. If you are facing the same issue, remember to reboot at this point — that is after enabling the “Themes” service, do reboot once. Once logged in again, you will be able to switch to Aero!

BTW, its been close to 2 years now since I posted here — was heads down on a project all the time . We did a Wireless Display solution that recently hit the market. Will post more on it soon.

Note that, you need to have Wii Internet Channel installed in your Wii. If you are trying to use your US-bought Wii outside US, with out a US credit card,try to use this trick.

How to setup Wiisic:

• Download latest version of WiiSic [Direct link to 0.815 / Home page
• Make sure you have a compatible JRE. All JRE1.5+ versions downloaded from Sun website are ok. Microsoft's JVM may not execute this JAR. At least, it didn't work for me under Vista.
• Double click on Wiisic.jar. You should see the launch dialog shown below [for v0.815]. If it gives an error, make sure you are using the proper Sun JRE (not Microsoft’s).

• Now you need to configure the settings. Choose the folder containing your media files first. Make sure you choose your network card from the drop down list in (3). Also. change the port to something like 8081. If you have a 16:9 supporting TV, choose the 16:9 proper player in (2). Following screen shown the settings I used in my computer.

• Now switch on your Wii. Open the Wii Internet channel. Type the IP that is shown under (4) in Opera’s address bar. Wiisic should load now and start playing the stuff you chose under (1) above.

This has to proved to be the most effective inside-LAN-streaming-solution for me, till now. Let me know if you come across any other solutions. 

One of the initial problems you’d face trying to setup the Wii in India is the power converter. You *cannot* plugin Wii directly in to one of our power sockets, it will just burn! Unless you want to do the burn-in (!?) test with your Wii, I suggest you go out and buy a 220-110v power adapter (stepdown). It is available in many wattages, for Wii a 50W or 100W should suffice.

The only other thing you’d find a bit problematic is buying Wii points. Mine is a US Wii, so whenever I try buying Wii points online, it asks for a credit card along with the US address / Zip code blah blah…this one can be real irritating! Don’t lose heart though. There is a simple/effective method (Based on this post). The trick is to find a region which accepts Indian credit cards with out asking too many questions The region found by the original poster is Brazil.

How to buy Wii points from India (Thanks to StringFellow):

• Change your Wii country to Brazil. You will find this option in Wii Settings section. Wii will now ask you to confirm the user agreement for the new region. Do press ACCEPT here, else you will get an error later when accessing the Woo shop. 
• Go to Wii Shop. If you already have “My Nintendo” account at Nintendo.com linked to your Wii shop account, Wii will warn you that the link will be broken. Don’t worry about this message. You can set this up again later.
• Once in, click on the “Add Wii points”. Enter your CC number, name, expiry date and CVV. In the next screen enter any random Brazilian postal code. I used Brazilian Discovery Channel postal code. You can find more of these postal codes in Google.

That’s all, it should work! I bought USD30 worth of Wii points and it worked flawlessly. Once you have the points, you can reset your Wii country to USA (if yours is a US Wii like mine) and reconnect the Wii Shop login with your Nintendo.com login.

What to do with the Wii points?

You can buy Wii Channels, Virtual Console games or WiiWare games online from the Wii shop, using the Wii points. I strongly suggest you buy Wii Internet (Opera) channel. It costs only 500points (USD5.0) and it is worth it. Quickly checking the Orkut, sitting in the couch is bliss, I tell you

Not many use this powerful emulator as a disassembler though. I have used this technique to disassemble many programs with out resorting to IDA or Sourcer.

Step by step instructions:

1. Download & install the HeavyDebug enabled Dosbox from here – Dosbox 0.72 (Heavy Debug). Check this page for other Dosbox versions.
2. Open Dosbox. You will see two windows opening, the main Dosbox shell window and the debug window. Debug window looks as shown below:
3. Switch to the DosShell window (the window where you can type your commands). Mount the program directory as C:\. Go to C:\.
4. Load the program to debug by typing
   

   debug <programname>

   For example, debug runme.com

5. Dosbox will load the program and wait on the first instruction of the program entry point. Switch to Dosbox Debug window.
6. Type the following command in the debug prompt and press ENTER.
   

   LOG 100000

   This command instructs Dosbox to log all the instructions along with the registers contents for the next 100,000 CPU cycles. Dosbox will respond with “DEBUG: Starting log.” status message. Once 100,000 CPU cycles are done, Dosbox will let us know by the status message “DEBUG: cpu log LOGCPU.TXT created“. The log statements can be found in LOGCPU.TXT (in the Dosbox folder). Try increasing the cycle count number, if you want to capture more LOG statements.

7. The execution is stopped when the specified number of cycles are done. You can decide to continue logging the rest of the program by issuing the same LOG command again. Note that, by default the LOG statements go to LOGCPU.TXT. So, you may want to rename the LOG files as LOGCPU1.txt, LOGCPU2.txt and so on, if you want more than 100,000 cycles.

Higher the number you specify for LOG command, the more space Dosbox needs for writing all those LOG statements. On an average you can expect around 250MB to be used by Dosbox for dumping 100,000 cycles.

Logcpu.txt contains the executed instructions in the format shown below:

0128:000003D3 je 000003D0 ($-5) (up) EAX:00000000 EBX:0000016E ECX:000000B1 EDX:000003DA ESI:00000D07 EDI:00000D09 EBP:00000020 ESP:0000FFF4 DS:0128 ES:0128 FS:0000 GS:0000 SS:0128 CF:0 ZF:40 SF:0 OF:0 AF:0 PF:4 IF:0

0128:000003D0 in al,dx EAX:00000000 EBX:0000016E ECX:000000B1 EDX:000003DA ESI:00000D07 EDI:00000D09 EBP:00000020 ESP:0000FFF4 DS:0128 ES:0128 FS:0000 GS:0000 SS:0128 CF:0 ZF:40 SF:0 OF:0 AF:0 PF:4 IF:0

0128:000003D1 test al,08 EAX:00000000 EBX:0000016E ECX:000000B1 EDX:000003DA ESI:00000D07 EDI:00000D09 EBP:00000020 ESP:0000FFF4 DS:0128 ES:0128 FS:0000 GS:0000 SS:0128 CF:0 ZF:40 SF:0 OF:0 AF:0 PF:4 IF:0

As can be seen, all the instructions along with the registers are dumped. All we need to do now is to clean up this file by retaining only the disassembled instruction and removing everything else. I use Textpad’s Find/Replace for doing this, a dedicated tool will be a better option though.

Main advantage of using Dosbox to dump the instructions like this is, if the program you want to disassemble is encrypted or is using some kind of mutation engine or even simply compressed and decompresses itself on-the-fly, you can let the program reveal itself instead of spending hours trying to get to the original opcodes

Luckily, WLW logs a lot more in the background. You can access that log file via Help -> About WLW. Click on the “Show Log Results” link in the dialog box. This will open the log folder.

Mine had this trace dump:

WindowsLiveWriter,21504,Fail,00020,18-Mar-2008 14:00:01.479,"WindowsLive.Writer.Extensibility.BlogClient.BlogClientInvalidServerResponseException: Invalid Server Response - The response to the metaWeblog.newMediaObject method received from the weblog server was invalid:
Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server
at WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Clients.XmlRpcBlogClient.CallMethod(String methodName, XmlRpcValue[] parameters)
at WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Clients.MetaweblogClient.DoBeforePublishUploadWork(IFileUploadContext uploadContext)
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.WeblogBlogFileUploader.DoUploadWorkBeforePublish(IFileUploadContext uploadContext)
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.BlogPostReferenceFixer.FileUploadWorker.DoUploadWork(BlogFileUploader fileUploader)
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.BlogPostReferenceFixer.LocalFileTransformer.Transform(String reference)
at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.HTML.HtmlReferenceFixer.LocalFileReferenceFixupFilter.FixReferences(String reference)
at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.HTML.HtmlReferenceFixer.OnBeginTag(BeginTag tag)
at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.LightWeightHTMLDocumentIterator.Parse()
at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.HTML.HtmlReferenceFixer.FixLocalFileReferences(String html, ReferenceFixer fixer)
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.UpdateWeblogAsyncOperation.LocalSupportingFileUploader.UploadFilesBeforePublish()
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.UpdateWeblogAsyncOperation.DoWork()
at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.AsyncOperation.InternalStart()"," at System.Environment.GetStackTrace(Exception e, Boolean needFileInfo)
at System.Environment.get_StackTrace()
at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.Diagnostics.LogFileTraceListener.Fail(String message)
at System.Diagnostics.TraceInternal.Fail(String message)
at System.Diagnostics.Trace.Fail(String message)
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.BlogPostEditingManager.UpdateWeblog(Boolean publish)
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.BlogPostEditingManager.PostToWeblog(Boolean publish)
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.PostEditorMainControl.commandPostAndPublish_Execute(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at WindowsLive.Writer.ApplicationFramework.Command.RaiseEvent(Object eventKey, EventArgs e)
at WindowsLive.Writer.ApplicationFramework.Command.OnExecute(EventArgs e)
at WindowsLive.Writer.ApplicationFramework.CommandBarButtonLightweightControl.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs e)
at WindowsLive.Writer.Controls.LightweightControl.RaiseMouseUp(MouseEventArgs e)
at WindowsLive.Writer.Controls.LightweightControlContainerControl.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs e)

Pretty neat stack trace,eh? It clearly shows that DoUploadWork() (Invoked by UpdateWebLog()) method fails for some reason. Armed with this knowledge, I took a look at my post. I had many pictures in that and my WLW was setup to upload pictures through XML RPC. So, obviously that was causing some kind of trouble. I traced down the big picture (size: ~0.7MB) in my post, resized it to 40K and published again. Voila, things worked perfectly!

I googled for the error message, since I wanted to know how other people solved this. Looks like increasing the memory size for PHP in the server side will also help. So, one of the following things should help you to solve this problem:

1. If you have images embedded that need to be uploaded to the server, make sure they are not big. I don’t have any idea on the *optimal* size. I guess anything less than 100K should be ok.
2. If still you are getting the same error, try increasing the memory_limit value in php.ini to 12M or 16M. Check this page for info on memory_limit. If you don’t have access to your server, you may have to talk with your host provider.

I believe the first solution will fix this error, in most of the cases. Do let me know in the comments, if you come across any other solutions.

Sign up to Talkr or Odiogo. They offer an unique service: They allow you to automatically convert your text posts in to Audio podcasts and publish the feed. The generated MP3s are stored and served by these sites, so you don’t have to worry about bandwidth and server maintenance.

How does this magic work?

Click here to see the different components at work.

If you have ever tried the Text-to-Speech conversion programs in Windows/Mac, you know what I am talking about and need no explanation, if not read this please

Other features:

Talkr has been around since 2005 (AFAIK), Odiogo is relatively a new service. There are even plugins to integrate these services seamlessly with your WordPress blog: Odiogo plugin for WordPress & Talkr Plugin for WordPress. I am sure other blogging platforms can easily be supported with little or no modification.

Personally I won’t go down this path as I prefer to hear my voice in my Podcasts, but this surely is an excellent service for those who don’t want to do everything by their own.

[Update (June 10th, 2007: Fixed all the typos. Thanks Bob for pointing out.]

There is a nice method posted by Ed Bott of Zdnet on extending the Vista’s trial period to 120 days (~4 months). I stumbled on this only recently, while seriously contemplating installing Vista ultimate in a Core2 Duo + 965GF combo. Nice trick, if you need more time to become comfortable with Vista before taking the plunge.

	CCleaner – The best utility for cleaning up the temporary files, IE/Mozilla/Opera cache and lots of other junk. This used to be called Crap Cleaner, If I remember right
	WindirStat – This tool allows you to visualize the file groups in your disk. There are umpteen number of tools out there that can do this, but I like the simplicity and effectiveness of this. Also, it runs off the shelf (no installation, I love it). Another thing I love about this small utility is its progress bars, it shows a pacman like character going from one end to the other, which is kinda cute! Check the images, click to enlarge.
	Duplicate File Finder – However organized you may be, you will be amazed to see what this tool digs out. It can apply CRC32 or MD5 on the files in your hard disk to find out the same content in multiple files. It takes its own sweet time to run, but very effective and highly recommended. An analysis on C:\ (120GB) is still running, almost 45mins now.

Let me know if you use some other tool not listed here.

If your Firefox is eating up memory, I suggest, start rootcausing by uninstalling the addons one by one. This’d atleast get rid of the addons from the problem space.

Below you can see the firefox memory consumption with and with out Adblock plus. Click the image to enlarge.

Before:

After:

How to add this hook?

• Open comments.php
• Find the lines of code shown below. You will find it near the end of the file.

<p><input name="submit" type="submit" id="submit" tabindex="5" value="Submit Comment" /></p>
</form>
<?php // if you delete this the sky will fall on your head
endif; ?>

• Add <?php do_action('comment_form', $post->ID); ?> just above </form> ending tag. Save the file.

This will allow all the plugins that depend on comment_form hook to work properly.

Do you have one of those DVD players that can play DivX? The ability to cram in 4 or 5 movies in a single DVD5 disk is something that I simply loved, when I got one of these DVD players. Mine is a part of DAV DZ720 that I bought from eZone, Bangalore. It is DivX certified (up to DivX 6). It played all my DivX videos with out a hitch, in fact, the a52 (Dolby) codec is well understood by this player and beautifully handled.

Unfortunately I also have lots of movies in Xvid, which are happily ignored by this DVD player. So, what do I do to play all those content now? I had couple of options:

• Reencode all the XVID I have to DIVX
• Update my sony DVD player’s firmware

I checked up with the Sony technical support in Bangalore; the reply was plain and simple – “We neither release any firmware upgrade nor endorse it”. But, I knew of at least one Sony model, for which a firmware upgrade is available online. Anyway, I didn’t pursue this option any further as I didn’t want to experiment with my perfectly working DVD player, by installing some firmware hack! The reencoding option didn’t go well with me either, as I have seen what a lossy algo can do to an already lossy-algo compressed video!

I came across this small utility in installed with Xvid for Windows package, which solved all my problems (ok, not all…still I have this huge mortgage to pay off.)

How to play XVID in a DIVX only DVD player?

• Just change fourCC of your AVI to DX50 with Nic’s FourCC Changer (comes with XviD codec installation)

Thats all. Were you expecting more steps?

Note that, this may not work if the XviD movie uses GMC/b-frames/q-pel etc. and your player doesn’t support AS profile. The only thing you can do then is to reencode the movie in VirtualDub, using a DivX codec. It causes a big quality loss, but atleast it will work. Check out this link for more info on profiles.

BTW, except for a couple of files, the rest are playing well in my Dz720, following the above trick. I haven’t looked deep in to why some of those files are failing, may be some day I will.

When I tried setting up the Live Writer with my WordPress it gave the following error – “Invalid Server Response – The response to the blogger.getUsersBlogs method received from the weblog server was invalid“. A quick Google search brought up this link. I also found another post in WordPress forums, suggesting disabling all the plugins. After lots of trial and error, I hit upon a solution that solved my problem.

Live Writer makes use of XML RPC protocol to talk with WordPress. XML RPC makes use of XML for encoding the communication part. So, if the XML parser at Live Writer end is not able to make sense out of the XML response from WordPress (xmlrpc.php), it complains. This is what happened in my case, as the XML response from my WordPress site started with TWO newline characters followed by the XML starting tag. I don’t know why, but these characters at the beginning of the XML stream choke most XML parsers out there. I have seen this problem with Firefox 2.0/1.5, Feedburner etc.,. Here is a BKM of what I learnt regarding this.

How to fix the error – “Invalid Server Response – The response to the blogger.getUsersBlogs method received from the weblog server was invalid“

1. First step is to check the security part. Make sure your xmlrpc.php in the WordPress root directory is given Read and Execute instructions for you. Check with your hosting service people to see if this is properly set. Most probably your host should have given you a control panel for managing your webspace, you should be able to do this from there. For WordPress.com hosted websites, I guess this should have been already taken care of.
2. Go to your WordPress root directory. Open your wp-blog-header.php. Remove the NEWLINE characters (Enter’s) at the start of the file, before <?php tag, and from the end, after the closing ?> tag. Now save this. Make sure you remove the newlines from the following files too.
   • wp-blog-header.php
   • wp-config.php
   • wp-settings.php
3. Check if step (2) has solved your problem. If not, do step (2) for the theme files of your site, located under $WORDPRESS_ROOT/wp-content/themes/.
   • For example, if I am using Misty Look theme, I’d be checking under $WORDPRESS_ROOT/wp-content/themes/MistyLook
4. Try connecting now. If still you have problems, don’t worry yet, let us try one more thing. Sometime the plugins do cause extra output. This may be the cause. Try disabling all the plugins in your WordPress installation and try. If it works, great! Now, enable the plugins one by one and check to find out the culprit.

If you are not able to connect to your WP still or you have found another solution that I missed here, do let me know. BTW, I am using WordPress 2.1 / PHP 5.2.0

I started getting all kinds of popups. Ahhhhh….irritating. I decided to root cause it. I installed both Ad-Aware SE and SpyBot S&D. They found lots of common objects like DSO Exploit, Doubleclick & Alexa, but removing them didn’t solve the problem. So, it looked something new. Then, I opened the startup list (using msconfig.exe) and there I found a new entry — “C:\WINNT\IExplore.exe”. IExplore.exe is the main EXE of Internet Explorer. But, it is, by default, installed to “C:\program files\internet explorer”, so what is this file? A quick search in Google gave me the info. It could either be Backdoor.Aphex or a 35mb.com ad popper.

I searched for more info reg the 35mb.com applet. I have given some links related to this:

http://www.solid07.net/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=4&t=51143

http://www.solid07.net/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=5&t=51168

http://soompi.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=200297

and a complete list of discussions pertaining to this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=35mb.com+problem

The gist of the above is: 35MB.com furtively installs a program that runs in the background and produces these popups. And, if you read there policy, they hint at doing something like this !!!

How did I remove this?

I got a list of IE Objects using HijackThis! utility. There, I saw the CAB downloaded from 35mb.com still sitting in my IE download folder. I deleted it first. Then, I renamed c:\winnt\iexplore.exe to c:\winnt\111iexplore.exe (Deleting this file is preferrable. I wanted to analyze this file later. So I just kept it in my HDD. But, if you do not want to do that, just delete this file). Using MSCONFIG.EXE, I removed the startup entry for “C:\winnt\iexplore.exe” and rebooted.

NOTE: Iexplore.exe (the 35mb.com AD popper) runs in the background. So, even if u delete it using msconfig.exe it will recreate that entry. But, once you reboot, it cannot load during the startup as we have renamed iexplore.exe to 111iexplore.exe. Now, you can safely remove it from the STARTUP list.

http://www.bugmenot.com/

This site provides you with a username/password for all those pesky sites. If you have one username/passwd, you can submit them here too. How convenient!

There used to be a site (http://www.mailnator.com/) which gave you some random valid e-mail addresses for using in those registration pages. But, I guess, nowadays they are outta business.

http://www.codeguru.com/Cpp/V-S/devstudio_macros/versioncontrol/article.php/c3129

This solution makes use of Application_BeforeBuildStart() handler to increment the RC VERSIONINFO. The Build # is incremented even for failed builds.

http://www.codeproject.com/cpp/rcversion.asp

Not exactly an auto-increment solution. This allows you to enter the version info during the build process.

http://www.codeguru.com/Cpp/V-S/devstudio_macros/article.php/c3183

Another solution posted in CodeGuru. It is assignable to any key and when invoked it updates the RC “FileVersion” field and does “BuildToggleBuild”.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q237870

Solution posted by MS. The autoincrementing code is attached to Application_BuildFinish(). It updates a #define in versionno.h which is included by the user resource file (RC2) .

http://www.flipcode.com/cgi-bin/msg.cgi?showThread=Tip-AutomaticBuildVersion&forum=totd&id=-1

I haven’t tried this. But, the author claims to combine the best of MS & Codeguru (second one) solutions.

I used a modified version of the solution from MS (mine didn’t update the RC; instead it updated a H file that was included across the project). If there is a neat/effective solution for this, let me know.