XP Repair Install

Technorati tags: XP, install

Re-installing Windows XP isn't a good idea as a blind first step in troubleshooting problems, but there are specific contexts where it is necessary, as the cleanest way to "make things work".  One of these contexts is after a motherboard change that invalidates XP's core assumptions, typically causing a STOP BSoD on any sort of attempted XP boot (from Safe Cmd to normal GUI).

This is the situation that edgecrusher is in, as posted in comments to the previous post in this blog, and this post is my response.

Before you start

Firstly, I'm going to assume you have all the necessary installation and drivers disks, have your XP product key or retrieved this via Nirsoft Produkey or similar, excluded malware, and verified RAM overnight e.g. via MemTest86 or MemTest86+ and hard drive e.g. via HD Tune. 

Make sure the edition (OEM vs. retail, Home vs. Pro, etc.) of the XP installation disk you will use for the repair install is one that matches your product key, that the disk actually has the ability to do a non-destructive install (as many OEM disks do not), and that the disk can be read without errors (as tested by copying all files to a subdir on the hard drive before you start).

It's a good idea to make a partition image backup of your XP installation before you start, using something like BING.  Simply copying off every file is not enough, because unlike Windows 9x, XP will not work when copied in this way.

Also before you start, you may want to uninstall any OS-bundled subsystems that you've upgraded past the baseline of your XP installation disk, such as IE7 or recent versions of Windows Media Player.  Things are cleaner and more likely to be "supported" if you uninstall these before the repair, and re-install them afterwards, plus you'll have valid entries in Add/Remove Programs should you need to uninstall them again later (e.g. as a troubleshooting step).

Several sites describe the XP repair install process, starting from how to start the process, and going on to a step-by-step slide show or providing more detail.  In this post, I will mention a few specific gotchas to avoid...

137G capacity limit

If your hard drive is over 137G in size, then the Service Pack level of the Windows XP installation disk must be at least SP1 to install, and SP2 to live with.  In other words, you cannot safely install XP "Gold" (SP0) on a hard drive over 137G, and should apply SP2 or SP3 over an XP SP1 installation. 

If your install disk pre-dates SP1, you need to slipstream a later Service Pack into this and make a new installation disk that includes SP1 or later, built in.  Your other option is to install XP "Gold" onto a hard drive smaller than 137G, apply SP1 or later, and then use a partition transfer utility to copy the partition to the larger hard drive where the partition can then be resized to taste.

XP "Gold" has no awareness of hard drives over 137G and is very likely to mess them up.  XP SP1 is supposed to be safe on such hard drives, but there are some contexts where the code that writes to disk is unsafe and may cause corruption and data loss; from memory, these contexts typically apply to C:, e.g. writing crash dumps to the page file.  XP SP2 and SP3 are truly safe over 137G.

F6 driver diskette

Yep, you read right; that's "diskette" as in "ancient crusty old stiffy drive"! 

Most current motherboards have S-ATA hard drive interfaces that are not "seen" by the native XP code set (affecting Bart and Recovery Console boot disks as well).

The trouble is, the latest PCs often have no diskette drive, and the latest motherboards often have no legacy diskette controller.  You may come right with an external diskette drive plugged in via USB.  You'll also have to find and download the relevant driver diskette image and make a diskette from this, if yours is missing or unreliable.

If you use a USB keyboard, and this is not initiated at the BIOS level, then your F6 keystroke to read the driver diskette will be missed.  If so, you can plug in a PS/2 keyboard... as long as your new motherboard has PS/2 sockets; the newest ones don't.

Sometimes your mileage may vary, depending on the mode that your S-ATA is set to operate in CMOS Setup.  RAID and AHCI will generally not be "seen" natively by XP's code, whereas IDE mode may be.  But some nice S-ATA features may not work in IDE mode, e.g. hot-swapping external S-ATA or NLQ, and changing this after XP is installed may precipitate the same crisis as the motherboard swap... requiring a repair install to fix, again.

All of this is a reason why I consider the XP era to be over, when it comes to new PCs.  I appreciate how old OSs run beautifully fast on new hardware, and how attractive that is for gamers in particular - but XP's getting painful to install and maintain, and this is going to get worse.

Duplicate user accounts

Later in the GUI part of the installation process, you will be prompted to create new user accounts.  You can try to skip this step (best, if that works... I can't remember if it does), or create a new account with a different name that you'd generally delete later. 

But many users are likely to create a new account with the same one as their existing account, and that's likely to hurt... 

The two accounts will show the same name at the Welcome screen, but both will be selectable via this UI; I have no idea what will happen if you were to force the more secure legacy logon UI, which requires the account name to be typed in.

Each account will have a unique Security Identifier (SID), which is the real "name" used behind the scenes - but you can't login with that.  There will also be separate account subtrees in "Documents and Settings"; the one with the plainest name is likely to be the original, and the one with numbers or the PC name added to it is likely to be for the newly-spawned account.

At this point I'll mention another user account hassle that I generally don't see, because I avoid NTFS where I can.  If you find you can "see" your old user account's data, but aren't permitted to access the files, then you may have to "take ownership" of these files from a user account that has full administrative rights. 

This issue is well documented elsewhere; search and ye will find!

Broken update services

It's a given that the "repair" is going to blow away all patches subsequent to the baseline SP level of the XP installation disk you are using, unless you've slipstreamed these into your installation disk.

What's less obvious is that after you do the "repair" install, you won't be able to install updates.  It doesn't matter whether you try via Automatic Update, Windows Update or Microsoft Update, the results will be the same; the stuff downloads OK (costing you bandwidth) but will not install, whether you are prompted to restart or not.

The cause is a mismatch between the "old" update code within the installation CD, and the newer update code that was controversially pushed via update itself.  I can see Microsoft's logic here; if you ever wanted updates to work (e.g. you'd chosen "download but don't install", or disabled updates while planning to enable them later), then the update mechanism has to be updated - but doing so, invalidates the original installation disk's update code.

This topic is well-covered, as is the fix; manually re-registering a number of .DLLs that are needed for the update process to work.

Broken settings

It's often asserted that a repair install "won't lose your settings", and is yet waved around as a generic fix for undiagnosed problems.  Part of why it sometimes works as a "generic fix" is precisely because it can and does flatten some settings, which may have been deranged to the point that the OS couldn't boot!

So if you do apply any non-default settings, you should check these to see if they've survived.  I always check the following, and can't remember with certainty which ones survive and which don't:

• System Restore (may be re-enabled on all volumes)
• System Restore per-volume capacity limits
• Automatically restart on system errors
• RPC Restart the computer on failures (may survive)
• Show all files, extensions, full paths, etc. (may survive)
• NoDriveTypeAutoRun and NoDriveAutoRun
• Standard services you may have disabled
• Hidden admin shares, if you'd disabled them
• Recovery Console enabling settings
• AutoChk parameters in BootExecute setting
• Shell folder paths
• Windows Scripting Host, if you'd disabled it
• Settings detail in IE, including grotesquely huge web cache
• Windows Firewall settings; may be disabled if < SP2 !!
• Anything else you've dared to change from duhfaults

It's particularly crucial to enable the Windows Firewall (or install a 3rd-party alternative) before letting your PC anywhere near any sort of networking, especially the Internet, if your installation is "Gold" or SP1.  Not only do these dozeballs duhfault to "no firewall", they're also unpatched against RPC (Lovesan et al) and LSASS (Sasser et al) attacks, so you'd be "open and revolving".

By now, the original PoC Lovesan and Sasser worms may be extinct, but these exploits are often crafted into subsequent workaday bots and worms.  You may still get hit within an hour of plugging in the network cable if so, and probably before you can pull down updates for the OS, antivirus scanners, etc.

Cause and Distance

"Send this habitat module to Sirius Prime, now!"

' OK ...'

Right-click habitat module, Properties, Location tab, highlight "Earth", enter new text "Sirius Prime", press Enter.  Drone work, really, but Fred just counts himself lucky at being able to find a summer job.

Sharp distance runaround

I find it interesting that despite the strange and counter-intuitive models we've developed for sub-atomic matter, we still cling to the Newtonian idea that cause is carried by force, and force involves objects banging into each other.

So we've had "The Aether" before we could get our heads around empty space, the idea that waves must travel in a medium (neatly solved by counter-generating electro and magnetic fields), and the "problem" of action at a distance that is modelled on throwing particles around.

We understand space and time as interrelated through the speed of light, so that "distance" can be envisaged in either terms. 

Trapped in the mesh

Trying to resist the idea of desire-guided evolution, consider the need for senses (or sensors, if you like).  We sense what we need to attain, avoid or overcome, not what we can happily ignore as irrelevant.  Does hard drive S.M.A.R.T. monitor the tides of the ocean?  Nope.  Does the body monitor radiation levels?  Nope, as this had not been relevant during the timescale when shaped by selection pressure.

We are of the universe and are unable to transcend "distance" (be it conceptualised as time or space) at will, though we have a limited ability to physically move towards or away from things.  So we perceive distance as a dominant property of our environment, shaping concepts such as "cause and effect" and "the arrow of time". 

But this perspective may be a platform-specific perception issue, rather than a universal truth.  Perhaps if we visualize things differently - e.g. consider the distribution of mass as a constant, and "distance" as a particular parameter, then some things may snap in to focus, such as gravity as a "curvature of space". 

Often a graph that has a shape that is hard to grapple with, becomes a tame line drawing when the scaling of an axis is changed; certain problems, such as shapes that tend towards but never reach zero, may resolve themselves.  So it may be with "distance".

After writing this, I found the articles I've linked to, along with this one.  It would probably be more enlightening to fan out from here than to read the post you have just finished reading  :-)

XP SP3 "Stuck" Activation Dialog

Technorati tags: XP SP3 bug activation

You may see this failure pattern:

• Windows XP (SP3) demands activation
• You get the first dialog of the activation wizard
• But no matter which option you choose, Next doesn't

Specifically; this is the first dialog page of the activation wizard, from which you choose "activate via Internet", "activate via telephone" or "no, I'll do it later".  When you press the Next button, the button appears to depress fine, but when you let it go, the dialog stays where it is. 

If you were trying to activate by phone, then that means you don't see the list of locations to call, or the key to read to the call center if you do call.  So when you call the activation center, the first thing they ask you to do ("please read me your installation ID"), you can't do, and frustration follows.

Context details

I've seen this once, in the following context.  A PC had suffered hard drive failure, and was also in need of RAM upgrade and software updates.  So I first repaired the hardware by imaging to a good hard drive, added more RAM, replaced the duff CD-ROM drive with a working one. 

Then I did "the prelim"; MemTest86 to verify RAM, Bart CDR boot to verify HD via HD Tune, file system checks OK, formal malware scans OK.

Next, I boot into Windows, and am not too surprised when it tells me I need to activate, as the hardware has "changed too much".  I deferred this, and did what I usually do when updating XP systems this month:

• get off all networks and Internet
• uninstall free AVG 7.5
• uninstall Internet Explorer 7
• move all $.. folders from OS subtree to another HD volume
• defrag to consolidate free space
• apply XP SP3 from offline installer
• verify firewall is on
• install free AVG 8
• connect to Internet so AVG 8 can update
• upgrade other software; Java, Acrobat Reader, Firefox etc.
• allow Automatic Update to pick up IE7 and other updates
• attempt activation before applying OS and IE7 updates

During this process, I restarted Windows several times for various reasons, but the activation dialog would not work.  It only worked after I applied the pending Automatic Updates; then after the restart that followed, activation was fine.

Suspected cause

I suspect that pending updates cause the activation dialog to "stick".  This may apply specifically to XP SP3 or be a general XP issue that I had not encountered until now, as I seldom (if ever) have activation demands and pending updates at the same time. 

That situation can arise in the context of installing XP SP3, because:

• you want to uninstall IE7 (or IE8 beta) before applying SP3
• Windows Media Player falls back to old version
• you can't install Media Player 11 as it won't "validate"
• you can't install IE7 from pre-downloaded file
• you can't use the Update web site until you activate

So you rely on Automatic Update to feed in the patches you want, but may feel the need to defer installation of these until you've activated.  This applied in my case, because a lot of the updates were for IE6 which I intended to replace with IE7 anyway - so before applying updates, I wanted to install Media Player 11 and IE7, so that the updates I downloaded and applied would be "after" these.

If my hunch about the cause of this failure pattern is correct, then this combination of circumstances can create a "deadly embrace" of cross-dependencies; can't activate until updates are applied, but user doesn't want to apply updates until the system is activated.

Can't install IE7 on XP SP3?

On "you can't install IE7 from pre-downloaded file"; this seems to be a different XP SP3 issue. 

Usually, I can at least initiate the IE7 install from a pre-downloaded installation executable, though this needs to be online so it can pull down updates to IE7 as part of the installation process.  But this fails after XP SP3 has been applied; instead, one has to induce an IE7 install via Automatic, Windows or Microsoft Update.  Sometimes it's offered as a critical update, other times not?

When Add/Remove Doesn't Remove

Technorati tags: Uninstaller, XP, bug

What do you do when you go to XP's Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, find the software you want to remove, and the entry has no Remove button on it?

I found an answer in a forum thread, as follows...

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{Program Name}

If NoRemove is set to 1, the Remove button will be unavailable
If NoModify is set to 1, the Change button will be unavailable

Note that as the {program name} may be a CLSID, you may need to search for the product name (e.g. "Intel Audio Studio", using what you saw in Add/Remove) to locate the correct entry in which to find the relevant NoRemove setting.

Intel Audio Studio

In my case, I'd had to replace a failed Intel 945G chipset motherboard with a new Intel G33 chipset motherboard with attendant processor upgrade.  XP died on a BSoD STOP error on all boots, as expected (a self-serving product fragility that helps limit "license creep") so the next step was to "just" do a repair install... but that's another day's blogging.

The other motherboard came with Intel Audio Studio, which installs and uninstalls along with the sound drivers.  But when the motherboard changes, the old sound device vanishes from Device Manager, so you no longer have an UI from which the device (and thus drivers, and thus associated bundleware) can be removed.

Hence the problem: Add/Remove Programs has an entry for Intel Audio Studio, but that entry has no Remove button.  It "doesn't need it" (so implies the text within the entry) because it is "installed and uninstalled with the drivers".

The meta-bug behind the bug

Alun Jones said "Don't solve problems, solve classes of problems", and by meta-bugs, I mean the classes of problems behind the bugs you step on one by one.

Have you noticed how few USB-interfaced hardware vendors create driver installations that work with the Windows PnP detection, prompt, and install sequence?  Most vendors tell you to avoid that by first auto-running their installation CD or running their Setup.exe, and then plugging in the USB device only after the "drivers" are loaded.

One reason may be because the vendor wants to install a range of software that is broader than that handled by the device driver installation purpose.  And this is where the meta-bug comes in, because whereas drivers are suppressed when the device is not found, the rest of the bundled software is not.  This is what causes your Display Properties dialogs to crash when you replace your graphics card, if the old graphics card left device-specific code hooked into the Properties page.

In this case, the meta-bug caused an apparent inability to uninstall Intel Audio Studio.  With the new motherboard in place, a dialog appears on every boot to the effect that Intel Audio Studio doesn't work with the system's (different) audio, prompting my attempts to uninstall the software via Add/Remove Programs.

What is particularly annoying, is that Intel's web site has nothing I could find on this issue - either via their own site search, or combining www.intel.com with appropriate search terms in a general Internet Google search.

Web Forum Login Blues

Technorati tags: Forums, Web

One of the challenges in web design and web forums in particular, is how to handle the requirement to log in for more functional access.

Whenever a login prompt pops up, folks will often simply leave, rather than log in, even if they are already registered at the site.  So immediate login isn't usually what you want to do with web forums; for one thing, you will lose folks who find your forums via search results that jump into forum content.

So web forums generally let you browse around until you want to do something that requires you to login, such as start new threads, reply to posts, etc.

Even at this point, I'm still inclined to give up rather than continue, when I see a login prompt.  Why?  Because I anticipate a hassle of not only login in, which I can handle, but having to re-navigate my way back to what I was doing - i.e. which forum, which thread, which one of 27 pages of posts (sometimes requiring 22 "next" because there's no "go to end" where the most recent stuff is found) and which post on that page, then the edit box I may have already started.

The Bart forums hosted here get it right; you sign in, and you are returned exactly to context you left before you had to log in.

Microsoft's web reader for their newsgroups gets it wrong, at least in the context of linking to their forums via other Microsoft sites.  Here's the repro; start here...

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie8/welcome/en/default.html

...and then at the bottom right of the page, right-click, Open In New Tab (the method I used, a straight click will likely do the same) on "Community Forums", taking you here:

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/list/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.internetexplorer.beta&cat=en_us_2BAF8EC5-645C-4477-A380-0F1CF6C102F9&lang=en&cr=us

So far, so good; we're in blah.blah.blah.ie8.blah which is where we want to be, and we start reading, then decide we want to post a new thread.  Oops, now we want to login, so we do, and when we get back, we are no longer in the context of the newsgroup we wanted to visit.  We didn't note the name of that newsgroup because we thought we'd always be able to link into it directly from the IE8 beta page.

Now I know Microsoft are battling to win over many of us usenet die-hards to embrace the web UI to their newsgroups.  This is IMO a serious stumbling block, not only for us, but also for folks discovering newsgroups for the first time, without usenet preconceptions and expectations.

The above is as tested on XP SP2 with IE8 beta 1 installed over IE7, IE8 Standards Mode, set to prompt on active content, all such prompts OK''d.

Workaround 1: Remember what the newsgroup is called, duh!  Not so easy in that it's not content that can be cut and pasted, in terms of the UI, and the nature of the data is a pain to remember.  Breaks the concept of "let the PC do it", too, plus that only gets you back as far as the start of the newsgroup, before you navigated within it.

Workaround 2: Log in, then go back to the IE8 page and repeat the link to the forums (which Microsoft may also refer to as "communities").  This time you will navigate into a logged-in state, and all will be well, though any navigation you did within the forum would have to be re-done.  For best practice (i.e. shouldn't be required, but...) remember to log out of both forum tabs when done.

NTFS vs. FATxx Data Recovery

Technorati tags: Data recovery

By now, I've racked up some mileage with data recovery in FATxx and NTFS, using R-Studio (paid), GetDataBack (demo), manually via ye olde Norton DiskEdit (paid), and free Restoration, File Recovery 4 and Handy Recovery, and a pattern emerges.

Dispelling some myths 

NTFS has features that allow transactions to be reversed, and there's much talk of how it "preserves data" in the face of corruption.  But all it really preserves is the sanity of the file system and metadata; your actual file contents are not included in these schemes of things. 

Further, measures such as the above, plus automated file system repair after bad exits from Windows, are geared to the interruption of sane file system activity.  They can do nothing to minimize the impact of insane file system activity, as happens when bad RAM corrupts addresses and contents of sector writes, nor can they ameliorate the impact of bad sectors encountered on reads (when the data is not in memory to write somewhere else, it can only be lost).

From an OS vendors' perspective, there's no reason to consider it a failing to not be able to handle bad RAM and bad sectors; after all, it's not the OS vendor's responsibility to work properly under these conditions.  But they occur in the real world, and from a user's perspective, it's best if they are handled as well as possible.

The best defences against this sort of corruption is redundancy of critical information, such as the duplication of FATs, or less obviously, the ability to deduce one set of metadata from another set of cues.  Comparison of these redundant metadata allows the integrity of the file system to be checked, and anomalies detected.

Random sector loss

Loss of sector contents to corruption or physical disk defects is often not random, but weighted towards those parts of the disk that are accessed (bad sectors) or written (bad sectors and corruption) the most often.  This enlarges the importance of critical parts of the file system that do not change location and that are often accessed.

When this happens, there are generally three levels of recovery.

The first level, and easiest, is to simply copy off the files that are not corrupted.  Before doing so, you have to exclude bad hardware that can corrupt the process (e.g. bad RAM), and then you make a beeline for your most important files, copying them off the stricken hard drive - even before you surface scan the drive to see if there are in fact failing sectors on it, or attempt a full partition image copy.  This way, you get at least some data off even if the hard drive has less than an hour before dying completely.

You may find some locations can't be copied for various reasons that break down to invalid file system structure, physical bad sectors, overwritten contents, or cleanly missing files that have been erased.  If the hard drive is physically bad, you'd then attempt a partition copy to a known-good drive.  If you want to recover cleanly erased files, or attempt correction of corrupted file systems, then this partition copy must include everything in that space, rather than just the files as defined by the existing file system.

The second level of recovery is where you regain access to lost files by repairing the file system's logic and structure.  This includes finding partitions and rebuilding partition tables, finding lost directory trees and rebuilding missing root directories, repairing mismatched FATs and so on.  I generally do this manually for FATxx, whereas tools like R-Studio, GetDataBack etc. attempt to automate the process for both FATxx and NTFS. 

In the case of FATxx, the most common requirements are to rebuild a lost root directory by creating scratch entries pointing to all discovered directories that have .. (i.e. root) as their parent, and to build a matched and valid pair of FATs by selectively coping sectors from one FAT to the other.

Recovered data is often in perfect condition, but may be corrupted if file system cues are incomplete, or if material was overwritten.  Bad sectors announce their presence, but if bad RAM had corrupted the contents of what was written to disk, then these files will pass file system structural checks, yet contain corrupted data.

The third level of logical data recovery is the most desperate, with the poorest results.  This is where you have lost file system structural cues to cluster chaining and/or the directory entries that describe the files.

Where cluster chaining information is lost, one generally assumes sequential order of clusters (i.e. no fragmentation) terminated by the start of other files or directories, as cued by found directories and the start cluster addresses defined by the entries within these.  In the case of FATxx, I generally chain the entire volume as one contiguous cross-linked file by pasting "flat FATs" into place.  Files can be copied off a la first level recovery once this is done, but no file system writes should be allowed.

If directory entries are lost, then the start of files and directories can be detected by cues within the missing material itself.  Subdirectories in FATxx start with . and .. entries defining self and parent, respectively, and these are the cues that "search for directories" generally use in DiskEdit and others.  Many file types contain known header bytes and known offsets (e.g. MZ for Windows code files) and this is used to recover "files" from raw disk by Handy Recovery and others - a particularly useful tactic for recovering photos from camera storage, especially if the size is typical and known.

Results

I have found that when a FATxx volume suffers bad sectors, it is typical to lose 5M to 50M material from a file set ranging from 20G to 200G in size.  The remainder is generally perfectly recovered, and most recovery is level one stuff, complicated only by the need to step over "disk error" messages and retry bog-downs.

When level two recovery is needed, the results are often as good as the above, but the risks of corrupted contents within recovered files are higher.  The risk is higher if bad RAM has been a factor, and is particularly high if a "flat FAT" has to be assumed.

In contrast, when I use R-Studio and similar tools to recover files from NTFS volumes with similar damage, I typically get a very small directory tree that contains little that is useful.  Invariably I have to use level three methods to find the data I want.  Instead of getting 95% of files back in good (if not perfect) condition, I'll typically lose 95%, and the 5% I get is typically not what I am looking for anyway.

Level three recovery is generally a mess.  Flat-FAT assumptions ensure multi-cluster files are often corrupted, and loss of meaningful file names, directory paths and actual file lengths often make it hard to interpret and use the recovered files (or "files").

Why does mild corruption of FATxx typically return 90%+ of material in good condition, whereas NTFS typically returns garbage?  It appears is if the directory information is particularly easy to lose in NTFS.  I don't believe all the tools I've used, are unable to match the manual logic I use when repairing FATxx file systems via DeskEdit.

Survivability strategies

Sure, backups are the best way to mitigate future risks of data loss, but realistically, folks ask for data recovery so often that one should look beyond that, and set up file systems and hard drive volumes with an eye to survivability and recovery.

Data corruption occurs during disk writes, and there may be a relationship between access and bad sectors.  So the first strategy is to keep your data where there is less disk write activity, and disk access in general.  That means separating the OS partition, with its busy temp, swap and web cache writes, from the data you wish to survive.

At this point, you have opposing requirements.  For performance, you'd want to locate the data volume close to the system partition, but survivability would be best if it was far way, where the heads seldom go.  The solution to this is to locate the data close, and automate a daily unattended backup that zips the data set into archives kept on a volume at the far end of the hard drive, keeping the last few of these on a FIFO basis.

One strategy to simplify data recovery is to use a small volume to contain only your most important files.  That means level three recovery has less chaff to wade through (consider picking out your 1 000 photos from 100 000 web cache pictures in the same mass of recovered nnnnn.JPG files), and you can peel off the whole volume as a manageable slab of raw sectors to paste onto a known-good hard drive for recovery while the rest of the system goes back to work in the field.

The loss of cluster chaining information means that any file longer than one cluster may contain garbage.  FATxx stores this chaining information within the FATs, which also cue which clusters are unused, which are bad, and which terminate data cluster chains.  NTFS stores this information more compactly; cluster runs are stored as start, length value pairs, whereas a single bitmap holds the used/free status of all data clusters, somewhat like a 1-bit FAT. 

Either way, this chaining information is frequently written and may not move on the disk, and both of these factors increase the risk of loss.  A strategy to mitigate this common scenario is to deliberately favour large cluster size for small yet crucial files, so that ideally, all data is held in the first and only data cluster.  This is why I still often use FAT16, rather than FAT32, for small data volumes holding small files.

Another strategy is to avoid storing material in the root directory itself (for some reason, this is often trashed, especially by some malware payloads on C:) and to also avoid long and deeply-nested paths.  Some recovery methods, e.g. using ReadNTFS on a stricken NTFS volume, requires you to navigate through each step of a long path, which is tedious due to ReadNTFS's slowness, the need to step over bad sector retries along the way, and the risks of the path being broken by a trashed directory along the way.

Some recovery tools (including anything DOS-based, such as DiskEdit and ReadNTFS)can't be safely used beyond the 137G line, so it is best to keep crucial material within this limit.  Because ReadNTFS is one of the only tools that accesses NTFS files independently of the NTFS.sys driver, it may be the only way into to NTFS volumes corrupted in ways that crash NTFS.sys!

Given the poor results I see when recovering data from NTFS, I'd have to recommend using FATxx rather than NTFS as a data survivability strategy.  If readers can attain better results with other recovery tools for NTFS, then please describe your mileage with these in the comments section!

Why "One Bad Sector" Often Kills You

Technorati tags: Data Recovery

Has it ever seemed to you, that if there's "one bad sector" on a hard drive, it will often be where it can hurt you the most?

Well, there may be reasons for that - and the take-home should affect the way file systems such as NTFS are designed.

As it is, when I see early bad sectors, they are often in frequently-accessed locations.  This isn't because I don't look for bad sectors unless the PC fails, as I routinely do surface scans whenever PCs come in for any sort of work.  It's good CYA practice to do this, saving you from making excuses when what you were asked to do, causes damage due to unexpected pre-existing hardware damage.

Why might frequently-accessed sectors fail?

You could postulate physical wear of the disk surface, especially if the air space is polluted with particular matter, e.g. from a failed filter or seal, or debris thrown up from a head strike.  This might wear the disk surface most, wherever the heads were most often positioned.

You could postulate higher write traffic to increase the risk of a poor or failed write that invalidates the sector.

Or you could note that if a head crash is going to happen, it's most likely to happen where the heads are most often positioned.

All of the above is worse if the frequently-accessed material is never relocated by file updates, or defrag.  That may apply to files that are always "in use", as well as structural elements of the file system such as FATs, NTFS MFT, etc. 

Core code files may also be candidates if they have to be repeatedly re-read after being paged out of RAM - suggesting a risk mechanism that involves access rather than writes, if so.

As it is, I've often seen "one bad sector" within a crucial registry hive, or one of the core code files back in the Win9x days.  Both of these cause particular failure patterns that I've seen often enough to recognize, e.g. the Win9x system that rolls smoothly from boot to desktop and directly to shutdown, with no error messages, that happens when one of the core code files is bent.

I've often seen "one bad sector" within frequently-updated file system elements, such as FATs, NTFS "used sectors" bitmap, root directory, etc. which may explain why data recovery from bad-sector-stricken NTFS is so often unsatisfactory. 

But that's another post...

Google Desktop vs. Vista Search

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Apple, Safari, Google, anti-trust

Google accuses Microsoft of anti-competitive behaviour, in that Vista currently leverages its own desktop search over Google Desktop and other alternatives.  This issue is well-covered elsewhere, but some thoughts come to mind...

Isn't Google hardwired as the search engine within Apple's Safari?

Isn't Apple pushing Safari via the "software update" process as bundled with iTunes and QuickTime, even if the user didn't have Safari installed to begin with?

I'm seeing a lot of black pots and kettles here.

More to the point: If an alternate serach is chosen by the user or system builder, is the built-in Microsoft indexer stripped out?  This article suggests it won't be.

That's the ball to watch, because so far, Microsoft's approach to enabling competing subsystems has been to redirect UI to point to the 3rd-party replacement, without removing the integrated Microsoft alternative. 

That means the code bloat and exploitability risks of the Microsoft stuff remains, and that in turn makes it impossible for competitors to reduce the overall "cost" of that functionality (as using something else still incurs the "cost" of the Microsoft subsystem as well).

This is particularly onerous when the Microsoft subsystem is still running underfoot. 

For an example of the sort of problems that can arise; if you have an edition of Vista that does not offer the "Previous Versions" feature, you still have that code running underfoot, maintaining previous versions of your data files.  If someone subsequently upgrades Vista to an edition that does include "Previous Versions", then they can recover "previous versions" of your data files, even though those files were altered before Vista was upgraded.

So it's not enough to give Google (and presumably others, this complaint is not just for the benefit of the search king, is it?) equal or pre-eminant UI space.  If one has to accept the runtime overhead of some 3rd-party's indexer, then it's imperitive that Microsoft's indexer is not left running as well. 

As it is, indexer overhead is a big performance complaint with Vista.  If 3rd-party desktop search has to suffer the overhead of two different indexers, the dice are still loaded against the competition, because no matter how much more efficient the 3rd-party indexer may be, the overall result is worse performance.

SysClean on Bart PE

Technorati tags: Bart, antivirus, mOS, SysClean

Trend SysClean is a self-contained, stand-alone malware cleaner that can be used from the Bart PE boot CDR environment.  Unlike many free cleaners such as McAfee Stinger and Avast Cleaner, it detects most things that a full-range resident av would detect, rather than a small subset of these.

On the face of it, it should be easy to run SysClean from a Bart CDR boot, but there are a few gotchas that can mess you up.  If you're one who has sorted those out ages ago, yet recent found SysClean to no longer work in Bart. 

Either way, read on...

How SysClean works

SysClean exists as a SysClean.com engine, plus a larger signature data file with names such as LPT%VPN.xxx, where xxx is a 3-digit number that rolls over from .999 to .000 or .001 whenever there have been that many updates.  You can wildcard the data file as LPT$*.*, LPT$VPN.*, LPT$*.???, etc.

SysClean does not have to be installed before use, which makes it attractive as an intervention scanner.  There is no integrated updater, so you'd manually download the latest signature data before use.  As the engine is also subject to change, I'd recommend downloading a fresh engine alone with new signature data.

SysClean.com is not a true .com file, i.e. it is not a DOS-era 16-bit memory image of code that runs with all segment registers set to the same 64k space.  Instead, it is a Win32 executable that unpacks itself and then jumps into itself to run.

From all of the above, you can predict pitfalls when using SysClean from Bart CDR. 

General issues

The easy way to avoid these pitfalls, is to copy the files to a HD location and run them from there, all done within the same Bart boot session.

If you want to integrate via a SysClean plugin into Bart, you have to essentially automate this process, as well as avoiding a few other issues.

As SysClean writes to its own location, that location must be writable (i.e. can't run directly off the CDR) and must have enough free space to unpack (which may not be the case if running within a small RAM drive).

As SysClean.com chains into the SysClean.exe that it spawns, you must ensure your automation logic does not prematurely continue, i.e. after SysClean.com terminates but while SysClean.exe is still running.  The Start /W approach is likely to fail in this way.

SysClean launches sub-tasks, and that means it may fail in environments that impose limits on the number of tasks that can run at the same time.  WinPE, Bart PE and Windows XP Starter Edition may fall into this category.  If you have one "wizard" batch file that launches another batch file that launches a set of scanners in sequence, then scanners that start additional processes may hit the limit.

Some of the scans are launched as sub-tasks that run in "DOS-style" CLI windows.  If you used a tool within your launcher batch file to hide the batch file window, this may hide the CLI subtasks as well - creating the impression these aren't running from Bart.  I haven't gone into this, e.g. removed my CLI winder hider etc. and thus am not sure the CLI scans are done in Bart, or really are skipped.

Recent failure pattern

If you've beaten all of the above problems years ago, you may have hit the following failure pattern recently...

SysClean extracts itself and runs OK, presenting you with its GUI.  You then slick the Scan button and it starts scanning memory, before scanning files.  But it never completes this process; even after the CD and hard drive burbling stops, it just sits there "scanning memory..." forever.

The system and app haven't crashed.  If you click to stop the scan, nothing happens, but if you click the [x] to close SysClean's window, that works.

Quick fix

If you run SysClean again, within the same Bart session, it works perfectly!

Why does if fail the first time?

A few months ago, SysClean changed its behaviour; at the start of the scanning process, between checking memory and scanning files, it now pops up an "OK" status dialog, to the effect that no viruses were found in memory.

When run in Bart, this dialog never appears - so you can't see it and you can't click it away.  And thus, SysClean will stall, waiting for an "OK" click that will never come.

Why does it work the second time?

When SysClean runs, it spawns a resident process called TSC.BIN that remains running after SysClean is done.  This is spawned before the failed "OK" prompt; I suspect it's spawned as early as possible, to run as "air cover" should any active malware code try to interfere with the scanning process.

The problematic prompt is only launched if TSC.BIN is not already running when SysClean starts its scan (perhaps TSC.BIN is itself the origin of the prompt, as part of its initialisation). 

So the first scan starts TSC.BIN and suffers the UI stall, whereas all subsequent scans during the same Bart session will already have TSC.BIN running and are OK.

I see one SysClean plugin approach may side-step this issue by scooping the extracted files into the plugin, rather than having the plugin run SysClean.com to extract them at runtime.  This may avoid the problem if it is the extraction process that triggers the dialog - though that seems unlikely.

Person Of The Year: The Unknown Assailant

Around about now, Time magazine usually has a "person of the year" award.  One year they got cute with this, e.g. citing "you" as that person, empowered as you are by your access to online content creation, etc.

But consider the extent to which your range of activities are constrained by the possible actions of anonymous entities.  Some of us are well accustomed to that in "real life", and now it is carving deep inroads into the online experience. 

Several business practices have had to be abandoned within years of becoming possible, such as vendor-to-consumer email, online greeting cards, etc.  For example, savvy users won't click on attachments or links within email "from" vendors, which leaves the dumbo demographic for such practices.  That may no longer be where the smart money can be earned, but it remains a good place to snatch dumb money - so these practices become dominated by malicious, value-free "vendors".

And so we see whole chunks of Internet practice and OS "features" being abandoned to my nomination for "person" of the year; the unknown assailant.

What You Can't See

Last weekend I was at the Festival of Chariots, and got talking to someone there.  After asking what I did, she said "ah, you have a scientific brain; you don't believe in what you can't see".

That's not the case at all; if anything, science reminds us of the limitations of what we can see, and scientific rigor suggests we can't make authoritative claims on what we can't see - including claims as to whether or not such things exist.

In fact, only one of our senses works off-planet, and that is sensitive to a very narrow spectrum of photon energies.  Much of what we currently "see", is visualized via artificial methods, i.e. sensory equipment and arbitrary interpretive processing.

Finding Recent Comments

This is one reason I prefer WordPress to Blogger. Once I've OK'd comments, I have to smell where they are if I want to reply to them with comments on my own - there's no UI to access "recent comments" irrespective of which post they are commenting.

Post-Google Blogger being what it is, there's also no easy route to submit this feedback to the blogging service (no, I don't want to do the whole "forum" thing, thanks). Live Spaces is better there; they're always keen for feedback and new ideas.

Malware "War", Lost Territory

Technorati tags: Malware, Safety

I've often seen the malware situation described as a "war", and conventionally, wars are fought over territory. 

What territory has been lost to malware?

Consider various integration points that are now routinely defended against usage, on the basis that the only things likely to use these, are malware.  These OS "features" are now effectively "owned" by malware, in that legitimate software will trigger defence alerts if they are used.

Consider a number of ill-advised features that are designed to allow arbitrary material to automate the system, e.g. MS Word auto-running macros, auto-running scripts in HTML email "messages", \Autorun.inf processing on USB flash drives, etc.  Today, these will typically be disabled, because the most likely use will be by malware.  So Malware "own" that, too.

Consider several business models that involve messages, attachments or links sent by the service's site, such as email greeting cards.  As malware can arrive via forgeries of such messages, usage is limited to those who are too dumb to know the risk they are expecting the recipient to take, which is a smaller and more limited demographic than when such services were first started.  Effectively, these kinds of businesses and practices have been killed by malware.

Should we scorch and abandon some of this territory?  For example, remove OS integration points that are hardly ever used by anything other than malware?

Should we assess likely future "ownership" before creating new technologies and features that are likely to be swamped by malware?

Norton Security Scan - False Positives

Technorati tags: Malware, Risk Management, Safety, Bug

The Norton Security Scan utility is free, and bundled with the Google Pack.  It's an on-demand scanner that looks for malware and risks.

Unfortunately, it detects protective settings applied by Spyware Blaster and similar tools, as being the malware these tools are protecting against. This is a generic type of bug that often arises when tools assume anything other than default is a hostile change, or when overly-loose detection cues are in effect.

Specifically, settings within HKCU's P3P\History that block unwanted cookies, are detected as evidence of malware.  In the case I'm currently working on, only around 5 of over 100 protective entries were detected in this way.

The tool then claims it is unable to fix these problems, which is just as well, as doing so would actually weaken system safety.  The end result is similar to Winfixer et al, i.e. false-positive (actually, reverse-positive) detections plus referral to feeware products if these are to be "fixed" - so one hopes Symantec will fix this sooner rather than later.

The case I'm working on is interesting, as it was brought in because it was slowing down, with malware as the suspected cause.  Formal scanning finds no active malware, and one wonders if the slowdown was the result of installing Google desktop etc., with the false-positive from Norton Security Scan as the red herring.

I'd like to try Norton Security Scan within mOS contexts such as Bart or WinPE CDR boot, but it appears as if the product is available only via Google Pack.  There are no references to it at Symantec's site, and the FAQ doesn't seem to consider "so where can I download this thing?" to be "frequently asked".

SARS Tax Returns vs. Acrobat Reader

Technorati tags: South Africa, Risk Management, Safety

Those using the South African Revenue Service (SARS) e-filing facility may find non-default safety settings within Adobe Acrobat Reader get in the way.

How to fix

Most likely you need only enable JavaScript, but when I had to troubleshoot this in the field, I applied all of the following settings...

Run Adobe Acrobat Reader 8.x

Edit menu, Preferences

JavaScript icon, [x] Enable Acrobat JavaScript

Multimedia Trust icon, Trusted Documents radio button, [x] Allow Multimedia Operations

Multimedia Trust icon, Other Documents radio button, [x] Allow Multimedia Operations

Trust Manager icon, [x] Allow Opening of Non-PDF File Attachments with External Applications

...and reversed them for safety when done.

Why use safer settings?

If these non-default settings stop things like SARS e-filing from working, why apply them? 

Because Acrobat files are already being exploited by spam, and a significant safety gap exists between what you think a .PDF is (i.e. a data format that is safe to read) and what it can do (automate your system via JavaScript, launching of other files and code, etc.).

Acrobat Reader is an exploitable surface that has often been patched to "fix" it, and for which unpatched vulnerabilities often exist.  Commercial enterprises have already exploited the by-design safety gap, e.g. by having .PDF documents "call home" when they are read, so that their usage can be tracked. 

So one should keep Acrobat Reader on a very short leash, or use something else to "open" .PDF and other Acrobat file types.

Understanding Integers

Technorati tags: Number theory

Which is the largest of these rational numbers?

• 1.5075643002
• 5.2
• 5.193
• 5.213454

If you say 5.213454, then you're still thinking in integer terms.  If you say 1.5075643002 is the largest within a rational number frame of reference, then you thinking as I am right now.

Is Pi an irrational number, or have we just not effectively defined it yet?  With the Halting Problem in mind, can we ever determine whether Pi is rational or irrational?  On that basis, is there such a thing as irrational real numbers, or are these just rational numbers beyond the reach of our precision?  Unlike most, this last question will be answered within this article.

Rational numbers

I was taught that rational numbers were those that can be expressed as one integer divided by another - but I'm reconsidering that as numbers that lie between fixed bounds, or more intuitively, "parts of a whole".

When we deal with rational numbers in everyday life, we're not really dealing with rational numbers as I conceptualize them within this article.  We're just dealing with clumps of integers. 

To enumerate things, there needs to be a frame of reference.  If you say "six" I'll ask 'six what?', and if you say "a quarter", I'll ask 'a quarter of what?'

Usually, the answer is something quite arbitrary, such as "king's toenails".  Want less arbitrary?  How about "the length of a certain platinum-iridium bar in Paris stored at a particular temperature" - feel better now?

Your cutting machine won't explode in a cloud of quantum dust if you set it to a fraction of a millimeter; within the machine's "integers", are just more smaller "integers".  If you think you understand anything about rational numbers from contexts like these, you're kidding yourself, in my humble opinion.

Integers

To put teeth into integers, they have to enumerate something fundamental, something atomic.  By atomic, we used to say "something that cannot be divided further"; today we might say "something that cannot be divided further without applying a state change, or dropping down into a deeper level of abstraction".

Ah - now we're getting somewhere!  Levels of abstraction, total information content, dimensions of an array... think of chemistry as a level of abstraction "above" nuclear physics, or the computer's digital level of abstraction as "above" that of analog volts, nanometers and nanoseconds.

If layers of abstraction are properly nested (are they?), then each may appear to be a closed single atom from "above", rational numbers from "within", and an infinite series of integers from "below".  Or not - toss that around your skull for a while, and see what you conclude.

Closed systems

Within a closed system, there may be a large but finite number of atomic values (or integers, in the non-ordered sense), being the total information content of that system.  If rational numbers are used to describe entities within the system, they are by necessity defined as values between 0 and 1, where 1 = "the system".  In this sense, 7.45 is not a rational number, but might be considered as an offset 7 from outside the system, and .45 within the system.

You might consider "size" as solidity of existence, i.e. the precision (space) or certainty (time, or probability) at which an entity is defined.  If you can define it right down to specifying exactly which "atom" it is, you have reached the maximum information for the closed system.  So 0.45765432 is a "larger" number than 0.5, in terms of this closed-system logic.

You can consider integers vs. rational numbers as being defined by whether you are specifying (or resolving) things in a closed system (rational numbers, as described within this article) or ordering things in an open system (integers). 

What closes an integer system is your confidence in the order of the integers you enumerate.  What closes a rational system is whether you can "see" right down to the underlying "atoms".

Information and energy

Can one specify an entity within a closed system with a precision so high that it is absolute, within the context of that system? 

We may generalize Pauli's exclusion principle to state that no two entities may be identical in all respects (or rather, that if they were, they would define the same entity).

Then there's Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, that predicts an inability to determine all information about an entity, without instantly invalidating that information.  Instantly?  For a zero value of time to exist, implies an "atom" of time that zero time is devoid of... otherwise that "zero" is just a probability smudge near one end of some unsigned axis (or an arbitrary "mid-"point of a signed axis).

Can you fix (say) an electron so that its state is identical for a certain period of time after it is observed?  How much energy is required to do that?  Intuitively, I see a relationship between specificity, i.e. the precision or certainty to which an entity is defined, and the energy required to maintain that state.

Entropy

If "things fall apart", then why?  Where does the automatic blurring of information come from?  Why does it take more work to create a piece of metal that is 2.6578135g in mass than one manufactured to 2.65g with a tolerance of 0.005g?

One answer may be; from deeper abstraction layers nested within what the current abstraction layer sees as being integer, or "atomic".  The nuclear climate may affect where an electron currently "is" and how likely it is to change energy state; what appears to be a static chemical equilibrium could "spontaneously" change, just as what appears to be reliable digital processing can be corrupted by analog voltage changes that exceed the trigger points that define the digital layer of abstraction. 

In this sense, the arrangement of sub-nuclear entities may define whether something is a neutron or a proton with an electron somewhere out there; the difference is profound for the chemical layer of abstraction above.

To freeze a state within a given layer of abstraction, may require mastery over deeper levels of abstraction that may "randomize" it.

Existence

What does it mean, to exist?  One can sense this as the application of specificity, or a stipulation of information that defines what then exists.  Our perspective is that mass really exists, and just happens to be massive in terms of the energy (information?) contained within it. 

There's a sense of energy-information conservation in reactions such as matter and antimatter annihilating their mass and producing a large amount of energy.  How much energy?  Does that imply the magnitude of information that defined the masses, or mass and anti-mass?  Do you like your integers signed or unsigned?  Is the difference merely a matter of externalizing one piece of information as the "sign bit"?  What do things look like if you externalize two bits in that way?

Like most of my head-spin articles, this one leaves you hanging at this point.  No tidy summary of what I "told" you, as I have no certainty on any of this; think of this article as a question (or RFC, if you like), not a statement.

Navigation via Recent Comments

Here's something this blog host needs; an ability to zoom in on the most recent comments, irrespective of where they are, so one can comment on them. If this facility is present, it needs to be more discoverable.

As it is, one goes in and moderates unmoderated comments, but having done so, they vanish from easy navigation so one can't follow them up to reply.

Oh... some more general "CQspace" news; I intend to focus more on maintenance OS issues and development (with a small "d", i.e. how to make your own projects by tailoring existing mOSs) and will do that at what is currently called "CQuirke's Linux Curve", as that blog host appears to have the best oomph to carry the blog-to-website transition I am after. As part of that focus, I'll still be learning Linux and blogging that as I go, but it will be a subset of that site as a whole.

New Blog Elsewhere

Technorati tags: Blogging

I've started a third blog here, mainly because I liked the look of the hosting service:

• No "bad cookie" alerts, unlike here
• Richer feature set
• Better suited to "normal" web site structure

Normally, each blog has a "theme"; this one is general, the other blog is about Vista, and the new one might be about Linux if I get traction with that.

I've checked out Linux from time to time, and this time I'm prompted to do so by what I see as deteriorating vendor trustworthiness, coupled with tighter vendor dependence; activation false-positives, WGA service failures that triggered (in this case, mild) DoS effects, OEM MS Office 2007 sold as "air boxes" i.e. no installation disks, and poor responsiveness and documentation on these issues.

I'm also checking out Linux as a potential maintenance OS (mOS) for Vista; possibly one that can service all Windows versions plus Linux itself.  The newest Ubuntu 7.x claims safe writeable support for NTFS, and until we see RunScanner functionality for Vista, that evens the playing field compared to Bart and WinPE (in other words, none of them can do for Vista what Bart can do for XP).

I expect it will take a year to build satisfactory skills in mOS for Vista, and longer to get a handle on Linux - which means if I want to be positioned to switch to Linux in a few year's time, the time to start studying it is now. 

The standards I set for myself as a PC builder require custom-installable disks to ship for all installed software.  Failing that, unrestricted and anonymous download is an acceptable alternative only if that is compatible with systems that have either no Internet connectivity, or slow and costly dial-up access.

OEM MS Office 2007 already fails this standard, and I refuse to sell it accordingly.  Given the stealth with which Microsoft has manipulated OEM MS Office 2007, I cannot assume similar changes impacting on Vista will occur only when the next version of Windows is released.  So starting on a years-long mOS development path may be a waste of time, if such work is applicable to Windows alone.

The first prize would be a Windows that isn't chained to sucky vendor politics, and I will continue to work towards that where possible.  If Windows becomes unacceptable, it would be quite a setback in many ways, but that lump may have to be swallowed... let's hope cooler heads kick in an Microsoft, so that we can still stay with the platform we already know and use!

WGA, Product Activation, Kafka

Technorati tags: WGA, Activation, Vandor, Consumer Rights, Surrealism

If Kafka wrote the Windows activation/WGA FAQ...

A: You have been found guilty and have been sentenced to die in 3 days.  Would you like to appeal?

Q: What crime am I being charged with?

A: Our code has found you guilty of being guilty in the opinion of our code.  You have already been found guilty and sentenced.  Would you like to appeal?

Q: What laws have I broken?

A:  The laws you have broken are those we assigned ourselves via the EUL"A" you consented to when you accepted our product.

Q: I don't remember discussions about an End User License Agreement?

A: Well, you wouldn't; we find it more effective to just write that up ourselves.

Q: I need details... what exact laws have I broken?

A:  We find it more effective not to disclose the details on how our code investigates such matters, or what criteria are used to determine the breaking of our laws.  All you need to know is that you have been found guilty and sentenced. 

Would you like to appeal?

Q: What do you mean "die in 3 days"?

A: In three day's time, your heart will be removed and further processing will not be possible.  If you do not have recourse to another heart and/or cardiac troubleshooting skills, you will remain inert.  Your body parts will still be available to those with the skills to access them; don't worry, no personal data will be lost, though of course you will need a new heart from us to work with that data again.

Would you like to appeal?

Q:  OK, I'd like to appeal.  Who do I appeal to?

A: Us, of course.  Phone the number, answer a few trick questions like "press 1 if you have two or more, press 2 if you have only one" etc. and then ask to speak to a human.  Convince the human you are innocent and your death sentence will be set aside.  If you are innocent, you have nothing to fear!

Q:  What do you mean "if I'm innocent"?  You've just told me you've found me guilty, and refused to tell me exactly of what I'm guilty?

A:  This is true, but we are not unfair.  You do have the right to appeal, as at September 2007.

Q:  So how do I present my case?

A: Leave that to us.  We will ask you questions, and based on your answers, we will decide if perhaps we arrested, tried and sentenced you in error, or whether our code works as designed.

Q: Works as designed?  What is it designed to do?

A:  It's designed to determine whether you are guilty or not.  We find it is more effective not to disclose details of how it does this.

Q: Can I review the evidence?

A:  We find it is more effective if the guilty party is not permitted to review the evidence, and thus we provide no tools to do so, nor do we provide documentation of what this evidence may be.  Any such documentation you may find will have been subject to change.  We will not tell you if, when or how it has changed, if indeed it has.  We find it is more effective this way.

Q:  OK!  Hey, everything's fine! I spoke to the human and explained what happened (which was easy in my case; nothing happened or changed, you just charged me out of the blue) and they set aside my sentence!  Thanks you running such a wonderful system that allows a lowly wretch like me to live again!!

A:  It's a pleasure, glad to help   ;-)

Three Little Pigs Build Computers

Technorati tags: Safety, Parable

If you don't like long fairy tales, skip ahead to the conclusions!

Once upon a time, there were three little pigs who set out to become building contractors.

One insisted everyone build their house on his land using only his materials, and charged too much money.  He didn't sell that many houses, and this story is not about that little pig.

One believed that people should build their own houses, and that houses should be built for free.  Many people were very interested in this, and often started building such houses, but found it too difficult and gave up, and this story is not about that little pig either.

Pig Makes Good: The Early Years

All of these pigs grew up in houses made of bricks, but this was a new planet where bricks weren't available (I did say "set out", didn't I?), so they had to make do with other materials instead.  At first, they made houses out of these materials the way their brick houses were made back home, but there were so many people wanting houses in the same place that they started joining them together in various ways.

The main pig became very successful, not only making houses for nearly everyone on the planet, but employing lots of builders to do so; soon, there wasn't a single builder who knew everything needed to build a complete house.

As more people came to the new planet, most of the big's earnings came from building hotels and blocks of flats.  They still built lots of houses, but stopped thinking about how those would be made because that wasn't where the money was, and besides, those folks will always buy their houses anyway.

Wolf Atrocities: The Response

After a while, folks started complaining that homeowners were being eaten by wolves, and the quality of houses came into question.  Wolves will be wolves, it was agreed, but surely the idea of a house is to protect one from them?

Some folks suggested building houses out of sticks instead of straw, but the pig said "we have too many pre-built walls that we already made out of straw; it would take far too long to re-do everything in sticks".

Others felt that building out of straw vs. sticks didn't matter too much, as long as you did something about the open windows and weak door hinges. 

The pig said "if you want stronger doors, speak to the Door Lock team.  What's that about 'hinges'?  We don't have a "Hinge Team", so we can't pass those suggestions anywhere.  I promise we'll make doors with even stronger locks in future! (the squeaky things at the other end of the door will stay the same, of course)"

The pig also said "we've always built with open windows, and other businesses have come to depend on them.  How are folks going to deliver goods and services if they can't climb in through the window?  Why not retire to one of the bedrooms, and lock yourself in?  If you get eaten, it's your fault, because you will insist in walking around in other rooms that aren't meant for you - you are a resident, not a chef or a barman, so you don't belong in the kitchen or living room." 

So the new houses were built with stronger locks and new bedroom doors.  And as folks still needed to eat and go to the bathroom, they'd leave the bedroom doors unlocked and get eaten while in the other rooms.

Conclusions

1.  The past can tell you only so much about the future.

If you focus on large-volume quality data from the real world while designing new products, you will design products that solve yesterday's problems while being wide open to tomorrow's new problems.

To avoid this trap, you need to brainstorm new designs with homeowners from the start, rather than present them with a near-completed beta product where the design is already cast in stone.  You also need to listen to theorists who cannot point to detailed real-world data because what they are talking about does not yet exist in the real world, and pay as much attention to these as you do to the detailed real-world feedback you get on things that already exist.

2.  Straw and sticks will never be bricks.

Know that you're forced to build with weak materials (exploitable code) and design your structures accordingly.  Any functionality may suddenly become a death trap or fire hazard, no matter what it was designed to be; so make sure such things can be amputated or walled off at a moment's notice.

3.  Airliners should not attempt aerobatics.

Know that you are human, and are building with straw and sticks.  Don't build death-defying skyscrapers that pose deliberate and unnecessary risks to homeowners.  In particular, don't build in facilities that allow arbitrary passing wolves to overpower residents in their houses, even if that is appropriate design when you are building hotels owned by wolves.

Risky tricks like DRM, product activation, linking real-time WGA to DoS payloads etc. have no business in teetering edifices built from twigs.

4.  Expose wildcard teams to new ideas.

Microsoft gets better at what they do well, while remaining poor at what they do poorly, or on issues to which they remain oblivious.  Why is this?

Partly this is from over-reliance on rich but historical data, as per my first conclusion in this list.  But it is also because their ability to develop is structured by present resource commitments.  For something they already do, there will be a product team; any idea on how to do that stuff better may reach this team, who will understand what it's about and can swiftly incorporate such feedback.

But if they've never seen the need for something, they will have never formed a team to develop it.  Any feedback on such matters will fall on dry ground; there is literally non-one there to process such material.

5.  Handle unstructured feedback.

Microsoft regularly solicits feedback via surveys etc. but once again, these measure what is measurable, rather than what's important - so the objective of "getting new ideas" remains un-met. 

Yes, it's easier to capture data gathered as responses to radio buttons, checkboxes, ordered pick lists and yes/no questions - but that limits input to what the designers of the survey had thought of already.

At the very least, every survey should end with a generic question such as: "On a scale from X to Y, how well do you think this survey covers what you feel should be surveyed?" followed by a large empty "comments" text box. 

A high dissatisfaction score should warn you that you are digging in the wrong place; the response might be to form a wild-card team and pass the dissatisfied returns to them for assessment of any free-form comments that may give a sense of where you should be digging instead.

6.  The cheapest lunch is where you haven't looked yet.

The saying "whenever I lose something, it's always in the last place I'd think to look for it!" is a truism, because once you find it, you stop looking.  In fact, "lost things" are just the least successful tail of your usual access methods.

You stop looking when you find an answer, but that doesn't mean you have the best answer - there may be better ones if you'd look a bit further.

With a mature product that still has problems, the biggest gains are most likely to be found where no-one's started looking yet - rather than improving existing strengths past the point of diminishing returns.

7.  In the land of the blind, name tags aren't useful.

The Internet is an unbounded mesh of strangers, so identity-based solutions don't apply.  Once you initiate networking, as opposed to generic Internet access (e.g. after you log into a secure site), such solutions may become useful... but even then, only if the user has a template of expectations to match whatever identity has been proven.  Even then, the process is only as robust as the twigs out of which it is built, and the Internet is a very windy place.

For this reason, I'd rate risk management as more important for malware and safety, both out on the web and within the system.  This is the barely-touched area that is most likely to provide your cheapest lunch.

8.  Who are the wolves?

All pigs become wolves in the dark. 

We are the wolves, and so are you.  There's no such thing as a special set of saintly piggies (e.g. "media content providers", "software vendors", etc.) who can be trusted with raw pork.