Nach der Frage, wie man wohl das Verzeichnis für die temporären Dateien von C: wegschiebt, und der Feststellung, dass nichtmal Microsoft auf %TEMP% oder %TMP% achtet, kam die Überlegung auf, dass Windows seit NT doch eigentlich auch Laufwerke in Verzeichnisse mounten können muss - MS DOS 4.0 konnte das, UNIX kann das, von daher, irgendwie muss das doch gehen.

Es geht: Datenträgerverwaltung, “Laufwerksbuchstaben oder -Pfade ändern…” bei der entsprechenden Partition, “Hinzufügen”.

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Es ist soweit. Nopcode, der sich intensiver mit Gamecheats befasst (als akademische Herausforderung), hat mir grad mitteilen können, dass Punkbuster jetzt mit nem Kerneltreiber daherkommt. Natürlich diskutieren wir jetzt Gegenmaßnahmen (wie gesagt: reine akademische Neugier):

• KMode-Treiber, der den pb-Treiber patched und sich gegebenenfalls wieder entlädt.
• Filesystem Filter Driver, der den pb-Treiber gepatched durchgibt. (Kann ein Filter so früh geladen werden, dass Treiber bereits davon betroffen sind?)

Mal schauen, was nopcode sich da noch so einfallen lässt :-)

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Quoting the Microsoft Service Agreement (which seems to be obligatory for those using Windows Live applications):

4. How You May Not Use the Service.

In using the service, you may not: use the service in a way that harms us or our affiliates, resellers, distributors, and/or vendors (collectively, the “Microsoft parties”), or any customer of a Microsoft party;

Unless there’s a more precise definition of “use in a way that harms”, that just won’t work.

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My Ogg player broke when I tried to install its software on my XP machine - it seems that the software tried to update the firmware (without asking me) and failed for some reason.

A friend of mine is here for a visit and for fun, we plugged the stick in his vista notebook - and it instantly found some “STMP3500” “player recovery device”. After searching for STMP3500, I’ve found an XP driver (different player vendor, but it worked perfectly) which allowed the firmware updater to do its magic: and now it works :-)

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I finally got a response to my inquiry about the Qt licensing exceptions for opensource licenses. I doesn’t look confidential, so here it is:

We will try to add the CDDL, but it may need to wait for a later release. The next package is already going through testing, so I think it may be too late to add it, but we will try.

I’m not sure how adding a license affects testing a release, but that’s their business. It still sounds great! Thank you, all the people at Trolltech for a wonderful c++ development library and supportive licensing behaviour!

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I encountered some problems reading one audio CD into a flac file (I like to keep them in a one-file-per-cd format, with integrated cuesheet, etc) - not even good old trusty cdrdao on win32 managed to read it (but did just fine on DragonFly).

Searching a bit, I found that the ASPI driver (which provides the interface to lowlevel SCSI-and-similar devices for userspace applications) requires some flags in the registry. cdrdao even has the necessary changes in its cvs repository. Just apply, reboot (took me a while to remember that) and it works (for me).

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After 8 Years of UNIX desktop (where not much changed - sure, glitzy-shiny features in the dozen, but still lacking in the usability and integration department), I bought a Windows license.

No Operating System without some weird corners, so I think I’ll collect such issues here (while looking for solutions). Sooo…

Episode 1: Try to delete a movie in a folder you just opened a few seconds ago. “This file is in use”.. That thumbnailer/metadata extractor stuff again, with no obvious way to get rid of it (or to teach it how to read that file in a non-blocking way)

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Yay for GNU Freedom. Recently I ran over a discussion where there were some concerns about the viability of using “binary blobs” in an implementation of the AES algorithm.

Sure, there’s a table in it, 256 elements wide, with some weird numbers in it. What is that table? It’s an S-Box, one of the central pieces of every algorithm that’s based on the Feistel cipher. AES is such an algorithm.

When looking in the the spec (FIPS-197), you can see (on page 16) that they’re defined just like that: a table of values to use. Where do this numbers come from? Probably some NSA office, where some mad scientist (just like you’d image, probably) took the hints from page 26 of the proposal (or not) and shuffled a box with 256 numbers, and carefully placed them in a 16x16 square (think of lottery)…

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I continued work on hg2mtn (which managed to import the whole onnv-gate repository just fine, stats will come later), and except for one issue, I’m feature complete: while I track renames now, I have to synthesize directory renames. This will work by looking for each rename if the source directory is getting removed and the target directory newly created. If so, assume that a rename from source dir to target dir takes place.

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Today I worked a lot on hg2mtn, a tool to import hg (mercurial) repositories into monotone.

The result of it is a first release that’s barely useful, but contains all the logic necessary to do it - what’s missing is userinterface, stability and general niceness.

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