I upgraded my laptop – more memory, and a larger hard drive. Not a difficult task, the longest piece of the job was resizing the partitions after dd’ing the smaller disk onto the larger one. Windows worked without a blink. It didn’t consider the upgrade reactivation-worthy (which is good).
Acrobat was a different kettle of fish – I needed to activate it again. I’m pretty much convinced that the activation data is based on the hard drive – probable the model and capacity. The tell-tale sign for this is that it refuses to work when you are running partition magic. As partition magic’s documentation is in PDF, this makes things quite silly.
This is ‘slightly’ covered on the activation FAQ, which mentions that if you low-level format your hard drive you’ll lose the activation information.
Keeping in shape
Just seeing if I was still capable of breaking the typical registration check in a program. Today’s exercise was Konfabulator, a prettification program for Windows and the Mac. Long and the short of it. Find out where the registration code is stored. It was in the registry. Find out what the registration key is (Registration). Found two functions referencing the registry key as two separate strings (Bad optimization on the compiler). One of them looked like it was trying to check the registration code, the other made internet check calls (part of the registration process – it’s over the internet). Went to the call that wasn’t over the internet and backtracked it – it was a very short, stubby routine with an setnz immediately following the call to the check. Replaced this with an setz, and the program executed flawlessly.
I was attempting to produce a keygen, but the one byte change was easier. I’m not planning on using the software anyhow, this was just me trying something out.
On other details, I have a chunk of encrypted data that I need to decode. I’ve deduced the structure size based on repeating patterns, now I need to find out the encryption scheme for the data – that way we can upsize it to the windows systems. There’s encryption on the data. The key for encrypting the data is in the application. The only reasonable conclusion I can come to about the encryption is that it is intended to prevent people from porting their data from the old system to a new one.
Of course I went to the Konfabulator web site to find out that it’s all free gratis and for nothing now – they’ve been acquired by Yahoo.
The joy of C
This one is one of my favourites – Comparing strings. The logic is simple: the function returns 0 if the strings are equal. The problem is that people code it like: if (!strcmp(x,y)), so a casual read can completely misinterpret the intent.
Explicit comparisons please people! This is one of those things that I’m glad does not happen in the more B&D languages.
Microsoft’s spot the bug
Microsoft have this ‘spot the bug’ blog entry. And while the code size is trivial, people have been finding more than one bug! Of course if you want some more fun spot-the-bug items you could try the Secure programming @blogspot, or even the linux kernel. Ok, anyone who thinks I’m being smart by this one can just bite me. You could also try the Open Solaris code also. So there’s plenty of things to keep you occupied with in your bug finding tasks.
Of course, you could try to find the bugs in your own code 🙂
Hari Potta
Read the latest book, primarily because I had to – after all once you’re about 3/4 the way through a series you are hardly going to stop. The year-on-year requirement of the books appearing is telling. The pace is getting very slow while the content is getting unnecessarily long.
The Underhanded C Contest
This one is a doozy. It’s the underhanded C contest. It’s purpose is to have people write seemingly innocent code that actually performs some sort of nefarious activity. If anyone remembers the linux exploit that was attempted around about January 2005, where some code was introduced which had the subtle side effect of granting people root permission. It was noticed and killed off… but what if people have been doing this for a long time already?
fish of the Day
Went visiting the nun in Kinsale today. It was miserable in kerry – drizzle, clouds, general grumpiness but once we got over the protective fog layer into Cork the weather was wonderful. I just got back and it’s still cloudy here. I tell you; west Cork has the weather.
MIT Blog Survey
To use the Bart Simpsonism… the questions kind of make you think; but in my case they make me think about my internet life.
Update to the update
Turns out that the thieves were stealing only good gold items (there was an article in the newspaper). Mind you, they would have had a more lucrative haul if they’d stolen other stuff as well like PDAs, laptop computers, but I’m not one to complain about this.
Update on Burglary
Turns out that there were about 6 houses in the area that had been broken into. All the houses exhibited the same symptoms, namely that things had been tossed around, but nothing stolen. Very strange.