I thought I’d seen just about every dumb thing that a developer could do, but this latest one from MSI is a whopper..

I have an MSI Wind netbook that’s having some shutdown and sleep issues when running Windows 7, so my first thought was to ensure I was running the latest BIOS version. For some reason, MSI still provides a DOS-based utility for updating your BIOS. Not having any USB floppy drives laying around, I went looking for a Windows-based tool instead.

MSI supplies a Live Update application, which will provide users with the latest BIOS and driver updates for their MSI product. It sounded like a good idea to me at the time, so I downloaded the installer and fired it up, but that’s when it just got a little too scary.

For some reason that I can’t quite fathom, it appears that MSI has decided that User Account Control needs to be disabled for their application to run. After installing MSI Live Update and running the main application, you are presented with this dialog box:

Clicking the only option available to you – the OK button, results in a UAC prompt:

Hmm.. DUAC.EXE, I wonder what that does. Let’s cancel that prompt and try the another tool included with Live Updater – Live Monitor. This one not only requires elevation to initially execute, but you just will not get anything useful out of it with UAC enabled.

Here’s a video of the application in action (on Windows Vista) – running LMONITOR.EXE will in turn run DUAC.EXE to disable UAC and then reboot the machine – with little warning:

Not only is this a sad indictment of MSI’s support tool, but this could potentially put many of their users at risk. It’s a real shame to see developers taking the easy way out instead of doing a little research and doing things the right way.

Fortunately though, the online version of Live Update (which is really just an ActiveX implementation of the installed version) does not attempt to disable UAC. If you own an MSI product, my recommendation would be to steer well clear of their Live Update utility and download drivers and other updates manually instead.

MSI Live Update disables User Account Control is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

This:

is obviously not the case:

CutePDF: F A I L is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Instead of waiting for Citrix to support Windows Vista icon sizes in their new beta client, I’ve updated it myself. I’ll bet the Mac OS X client gets a full size icon (Leopard supports 512 x 512 pixels). Why does Vista have to be a second class citizen?

Here’s the before and after shots:

I’m sure you’ll agree that ‘after’ looks much better. The crazy thing is that I’ve added the 256 x 256 PNG file that I originally downloaded from the official Citrix blogs site (I’ve lost the original link).

You can download the icon from here and update your existing shortcuts or break out a resource editor to update the executables directly. Here’s the original PNG file if you want to cook your own.

I’m going to try to be optimistic and I know this is a beta product, but I’m not going to bet on Vista icon support in the final release.

Citrix Drops The Icon Ball is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Expecting an application to execute correctly when run with limited user privileges should be something that we take for granted. Alas in the real world this is not the case, but things are getting better, if slowly.

Perhaps we’re currently in some sort of transition process as demonstrated by Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0. Adobe feel’s that it’s necessary to inform the user that they are running Photoshop Elements as a limited user:

I commend Adobe on shipping an application (especially one aimed at consumers) that will run with limited rights, but I’m sure most users are probably going to see this dialogue box and have no idea what this means. I might be missing the bigger picture, but in my mind this notification is superfluous. Hopefully version 6.0 does better, I’ll have to download the trial version and see for myself.

Should We Need To Inform The User They’re Running With Limited Rights? is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

It’s been a while since an entrant in the Hall of Shame, so today I’m pleased to bring you a bit of a chuckle courtesy of ACDSee Standard 5.0. It seems that the Tips dialog in this old version, doesn’t like it if you’ve installed the application to a non-default location (think sequencing in SoftGrid). Perhaps this dialog has a case of what my wife would call “Man eyes” (very similar to inattentional blindness).

Tip Of The Day – Ain’t Got No Tips is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Here’s an amusing dialog box that was displayed when Battlefield 2142 crashed the other day:

I dare not click Continue since I shouldn’t have been there in the first place and I don’t know what sort of trouble Try Again would have got me into..

(This one’s an entry in the Hall of Shame because Battlfield crashes on a fairly regular basis, which is just a little more than annoying)

Look, I’m Not Going To Tell You Again is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Gee, I expected a little more than this from Citrix – the new Presentation Server Client version 10 is still using the old 16-bit Windows Help format (.HLP). What’s the problem with this you say? Well, Windows Help is no longer included with Windows Vista and Microsoft have been discouraging its’ use for some time now. Yes you can now download a version of Windows Help for Vista from Microsoft, but it’s not guaranteed to work with all .HLP files.

So what are we left with now? An unavailable help system when you use the client on Windows Vista. And I don’t think that deploying Windows Help is the right solution. Citrix, can we please have a client worthy of Windows Vista?

Citrix do have a known issues list with the client and Windows Vista, which indicates the next client release for mid 2007. Let’s hope it gets a facelift and this help issue sorted out too.

Presentation Server Client 10 still uses Windows Help is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

TweakVI is a tweaking and “optimisation” application from Totalidea that is essentially a front end for a large number of registry settings that you can enable or disable to change the behaviour of features in Windows Vista. The application is mainly aimed at power users but I would assume that some slightly less power users would be interested in this application as well.

What has struck me about this software is that during setup you are encouraged to disable UAC because it “might cause warning message to appear”. Here’s the screenshots from the installer:

Here’s a couple of quotes from their FAQ page site about TweakVI and UAC:

Dragging files into the File Shredder listbox in the ‘File Tools’ plugin does not work. How can I fix that?

In order for the FileShredder feature to work, the Windows Vista User Account Control (UAC) must be disabled; otherwise communication between Windows Vista and the FileShredder via drag-and-drop is impossible. Please check your UAC settings (Control panel >>> User Account Settings). There you can disable UAC.

Certain features might not work as expected – what am I doing wrong?

It is possible that you have the new Windows User Account Control activated. UAC is known to interfere with some of TweakVIs features. If you encounter a problem, or a malfunction of a TweakVI feature, please check your UAC settings. If UAC is enabled, please disable it, reboot your machine, and check if the problem has disappeared.

So from these quotes, I gather that Totalidea finds it easier to get users to disable UAC rather that write the application correctly. This is really bad for users, novice and power users alike. Disabling UAC removes one of the major security improvements in Vista. I would have thought that an application that is used to tweak the operating system would be encouraging secure computing.

TweakVI encourages users to turn off UAC is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

There are quite a few design choices in Windows Vista that have me baffled, especially where an interface change to me seems quite logical but Microsoft have not implemented one. The Safely Remove Hardware feature is one such change.

In Windows Vista there are two ways to prepare a device for removal before actually physically disconnecting the device. The first method, which has carried over from earlier versions of Windows, is to right click on the Safely Remove Hardware icon in the tray and then click the device to remove. Like this:

Once Windows has finished flushing the file system cache, the following dialog is displayed to let you know that you can remove the device:

The problem with this approach is this dialog is a little in-your-face and you must respond to it with a mouse click. Surely a balloon notification would be a more pleasant experience? Well, let’s see what we get when you use the second method to safely remove a device. This method is accessed via the right-click menu on a device such as a USB hard drive in My Computer:

This results in a balloon notification in the tray, far more elegant than a popup dialog box:

So essentially we have two ways of achieving the same thing, but we get two different notifications. To me balloon notifications are far more effective and since they took the time to implement it, why not update the original notification too? Now as I don’t work for Microsoft I can’t possibly have an understanding of the design process, but updating the first method to match the new one just makes sense.

Safely Remove Hardware, gets a facelift, almost is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I’ve recently noticed a DLL file from Intel that keep reappearing on my system drive and I’ve tracked this down to the display software on my laptop – I’ve recently moved to a Dell laptop that has an Intel 945GM display adapter. Here’s the DLL in question:

C:\Intel\ExtremeGraphics\CUI\Resource\igfxres.dll

The properties of the DLL show this as the ‘Intel Common User Interface’. The file is loaded by EXPLORER.EXE and is dynamically created in the context of the current user when you right click on the desktop. The file does not exist anywhere else on the computer.

Because I’m a neat freak when it comes to file systems I don’t like having stuff like this lying around (pedantic I know), so I thought that I would see what would happen if I stopped the system from creating the file. I removed Authenticated Users (I run as a standard user) from the system drive so that the DLL could not be created. I then got this:

Before:

After:

Surely the file does not need to be created at runtime and surely it doesn’t need to exist in this location? I tested again after copying the DLL to the SYSTEM32 folder and guess what? It worked just as well. Someone over at Intel needs a slap on the wrist.

Intel Graphics and the Dynamically Generated DLL is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I’ve seen some dumb software in my travels and Mercury Quality Center is no exception; however this one has got me scratching my head.

Mercury Quality Center “provides a web-based system for automated software quality testing and management”. It uses a browser front-end with ActiveX controls connecting to a back-end process (I really don’t know much about the back-end). Now, as you would expect from the product description, Mercury Quality Center should be a nice quality package from end to end. In my view this would include a scriptable client installation package. Scripting any client software installation is important because it should be a consistent repeatable process.

Except that’s where they strike out. The incredibly dumb thing about this is the client software is packaged up in an InstallShield package which is only used to unpack some files and launch another custom installer. (See the screenshot). No silent install for you!

Who’s the dolt who created this? InstallShield’s not good enough to install your software? Surely quality software should extend to the installation experience as well? It makes you wonder.

Software Quality? What’s that? is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Objective is an Enterprise Content Management system from Objective that uses a Win32 client that plugs into Office and can also be used as a stand-alone application for access to documents. I’m not a user of the application so I don’t really have an opinion on its effectiveness but organisations buy it so it must do the job.

However this application has one small issue out of the box – errors are logged to a file located in the Program Files folder (C:\Program Files\Objective\Client 7\error.log by default). This, of course, is a bit of a problem where users don’t have write access the folder in question. What’s even better is that if authentication fails and the log file write fails, users will receive an error dialog which only has an OK button and essentially doesn’t go away, no matter how many times you click it:

You can see from the following Process Monitor screenshot the write failure in question:

Fortunately you can change the location of the log file with this registry string value: HKCU\Software\Objective\Client\Preferences\LogFile. The regsitry that appears to define a location and name for the log file is not actually read by the client at all. The issue, though, does beg the question – how does an enterprise class application come configured to write a log file to the Program Files folder by default? Would the users profile not be a much better place to write logs or even perhaps the Windows Application log? Maybe a developer or two at Objective needs their administrative access taken away from them.

UPDATE: I actually got to speak to someone from Objective today and he’s going to pass on this issue to the developers, we’ll see what happens.

Objective 7 Error Logging: Access Denied is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Bentley Redline is a viewer for DGN and DWG files that requires that users have write access to the application folder for the licensing component to work. Genius, pure genius:

Here’s a quote from a discussion list I found on the Bentley web site:

The sf.dat file is used by the licensing subsystem and needs to be in a folder that is write-enabled. Bentley Redline (or any other Bentley desktop product) will not run if that is not the case.

Fortunately it appears that you can run something called SELECTserver that looks like it can centralise licensing. Unfortunately the client I am implementing this in a Terminal Server environment for, does not have access to that software. Even if you have the SELECTserver for centralised licensing, users still require write access to the SF.DAT file!

Bentley Redline Requires Admin Privleges is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I think that this icon says a lot about the WatchGuard Firebox..

There’s a Hole in the Firewall, Dear Liza is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

If you’ve ever downloaded a SCSI or RAID driver for an IBM server from the IBM web site, you’ll have probably come across the DOS based executable (yes it’s a 16bit executable) that unpacks the driver to a floppy disk for you. This thing makes you wade through 15 screens of license agreement and then you must agree to said license before it un-packs the driver to a floppy disk.

Now there are at least two problems with this: 1. We don’t really use floppy disks anymore and 2. On Windows Vista the executable just doesn’t run – Windows reports that the executable is invalid. I would love to talk to the person who puts these driver packages together, I bet he still wears, shorts and knee high socks to work (it’s a North Queensland thing..)

Hey IBM, it’s 2006! is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Today’s entrant into the Hall of Shame is Esker Tun PLUS which can be used to provide an ActiveX based terminal emulator via the web. This product downloads no less than 11 ActiveX controls and then wants the user to run an application named TRUST.EXE from a page that has the following text:

You are attempting to run a Tun PLUS session from the server, “<edited>”. Since Tun PLUS sessions require full access to your system, you must download trust.exe to enable access. Running this executable give Tun PLUS sessions permission to access your system. You will only have to perform the following operation once.

TRUST.EXE will provide Tun PLUS full access to my system. What else could potentially have full access to my system? Output from FILEMON and REGMON is a little cryptic when TRUST.EXE is run. I can’t quite work out what it is doing. Geez, at least my terminal emulator works. Shame, Esker, shame.

Esker Tun PLUS Requires Administrative Access is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

More fun with consoles developed in Java. Check out the administration tool for Symantecs’ Gateway Security 1600 appliance – 100% CPU usage just to display the logon dialog then 100Mb of RAM just after opening the console:

Symantec Gateway Security 1600 and Sun Java is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

TimeSheet Professional from Best/Sage/Buckhead/Whoevertheyare Software is a tool aimed, you guessed it, time sheets. It includes a Win32 client as well as a web client that runs on Java. However, there’s a couple of dumb things that it does.

Dumb Things #1: TimeSheet Professional provides a list of users on the authentication page even before you login. I presume this is to make it quicker for users to enter their times. Not a great idea for when there is a requirement to provide access to this software across the Internet. Unfortunately the only solution here has been to enforce authentication to the firewall before allowing access to the web client.

Dumb Things #2: TimeSheet Professional is hard coded for HTTP. To bad if you want enforce access to the web client over HTTPS, whether internally or externally. I believe this is an issue with the Java component of the web client, but unfortunately a bad design choice.

On the upside, the software appears to be JVM make and version independant. It allows for choosing the Microsoft or the Sun Java VM and even allows for Sun Java versions 1.4.2 and above rather than forcing a version number on you.

TimeSheet Professional is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Over the past week, I’ve been creating an internal Exchange best practice/check list document so that we can standardise on how we configure Exchange servers for our clients. This document includes a number of items including information on configuring AV scanners to exclude certain Exchange folders. I thought it best to provide the reader of this document direct links to knowledgebase articles on various AV products. I attempted to cover the following vendors:

• Symantec;
• Sophos;
• McAfee;
• Trend Micro; and
• CA

Now finding this information was harder than I thought, the steps taken to find the relevant articles was not straightforward. First I had to find out the current product versions (I still can’t find a product version number for the Trend Micro AV), then I used each support site to search for the terms ‘exchange’ and ‘mdbdata’. I used these terms because I knew that the \mdbdata folder is one of the folders to exclude. Here are the steps taken to find each document for each vendor. As you can see some are easier to find than others.

Symantec
- Browse to http://www.symantec.com
- Click ‘Support’
- Click ‘Get Enterprise Support’
- Click ‘Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.0′ under the heading ‘Getting Started’
- View the document ‘How to prevent Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition from scanning the Microsoft Exchange directory structure‘
Score: 7½ /10

Sophos
- Browse to http://www.sophos.com
- Click ‘Support’
- Click ‘Knowledgebase’
- Search for ‘exchange mdbdata’
- View the document ‘Sophos Anti-Virus for Windows: file exclusions for Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 and 2003‘
Score: 7½ /10

McAfee
- Browse to http://www.mcafee.com
- Click ‘Enterprise’
- Click ‘Support’
- Click ‘Technical Support’
- Click ‘KnowledgeBase Search’
- Search for ‘exchange mdbdata’
- View the document ‘Solution ID kb38560 – Configuring VirusScan Enterprise exclusions on an Exchange 2000/2003 server running McAfee GroupShield Exchange‘
Score: 7/10

Trend Micro
- Browse to http://www.trendmicro.com
- Click ‘Support’
- Search for ‘exchange mdbdata’
- View the document ‘Recommended exclusion list for OfficeScan 7.0 clients installed on a Microsoft Exchange 2003 server‘
Score: 8/10

CA
- Browse to http://www.cai.com
- Click ‘Support’
- Click ‘Technical Support’
- Click ‘SupportConnect’
- Click ‘Knowledge Base’
- Search for ‘exchange mdbdata’
- Hmmm.. two documents, nothing about Exchange and AV
- Click ‘Knowledge Base’
- Search for ‘exchange antivirus’
- Hmmm.. Go through 3 pages of results with nothing related to my search
- Click ‘Published Solutions’
- Select ‘eTrust Antivirus All User versions Multi-platform’
- Select ‘Release: 7.1″
- Select ‘Operating System: WIN2003′
- Click ‘Search’
- Grrrr.. ‘No solutions were found that match your search criteria’
- Click ‘Toolbox’
- Arrghh.. Nothing
- CA, you suck!
- Browse to http://www.symantec.com
Score: 0/10

Support Site Woes is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Last night I attempted to install Citrix Web Interface for Presentation Server 4.0 on a Windows box and received the following error:

I’ve been able to surmise a cause: I’ve removed the Default Web Site which has a site identifier of 1. So the Web Interface installer is looking for the site numbered 1, can’t find it and throws an error. So I thought to myself, “Surely there’s a solution to this problem?” I searched the documentation and support.citrix.com for this error message and the only thing I can find is this forum post which discusses a similar situation but doesn’t offer a solution.

Now this leaves me with a number of thoughts:

1. How do I change the site identifier in IIS to 1? Hack METABASE.XML? (That’s scares me a little) Reload IIS? (No thanks, but it might be my only solution)
2. Why does the installer not give me the choice of which web site to install to? This is especially annoying since you don’t actually configure a Web Interface site until after installation. Short answer: lazy developers.
3. Why is there no knowledgebase article or documentation on this error message?  Short answer: lazy developers.

Point 3 is what really gets my goat. If a product logs and error in an event log, throws a dialog box at you, surely there should be some documentation on the error. Microsoft are also guilty of this. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve been troubleshooting a problem, found an event in the event logs and found no knowledgebase article on the event.

Developers can write some fantastic code that solves a solution, but I find that they forget about the people who install and maintain their products. Lack of detailed documentation makes supporting a product difficult. If an application throws an error, I don’t see any excuse not to document the error, anything less is unacceptable.

Troubleshooting Woes is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Ahh PDC is on and Windows developers all over the globe must be feeling good about themselves. Any why shouldn’t they? They develop finely tuned pieces of software that’s usable and secure and even does wonderful things like error checking. Pfftt.. give me a break. Here’s some wonderful error messages I received whilst installing a patch for Trend Micro’s ScanMail for Exchange:

Now hang on, I didn’t install the FTP Publishing Service on my Exchange server, what the hell are Trend on about? So I press cancel and the patch installs, then it restarts the services it stopped and I get this message:

“Dude. Didn’t I just say I didn’t have the FTP Publishing Service installed?” So I click the Cancel button again and I get the same message for the NNTP service, which is installed but like all default Exchange Server 2003 installs is disabled. And I get the same for the POP3 and IMAP4 services. Did these guys actually test the patch installer? What sort of quality testing do these things go through? Hmm.. I might go and play some Battlefield 2 and pretend the enemy are all Trend Micro employees..

I’ve got what installed in the what-now? is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.