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Welcome to SimGuy.net! Here you will find information about me, my hobbies, and my projects. I will try to blog some happenings in my life or rant about things that bug me at least a few times a month. Anything I post is fair game for comments and public ridicule, so interact by all means!

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Words of Wisdom

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

[Comments: 0] 2:34 AM - SecuROM Strikes Again

I got Dragon Age II today, as a birthday gift. I figured I'd try the PC version this time on recommendation from my friend.

I'm not ready to start playing DA2 yet because I'm still playing through Dragon Age: Origins on my Xbox 360. I thought it would be a good idea to register the game, install it and make sure it works properly so that as soon as I'm done with Origins I can jump right in. I expected it to be nothing more than a quick check. Of course I was wrong!

DA2 for PC uses a product related to SecuROM from Sony DADC that verifies the game is released. The reasoning behind this is that it was possible to download the full game in advance via Steam and EA wanted to make sure no one was playing it before release day.

This software includes the usual checks for debuggers and anything that might be used to pirate or reverse engineer the game and then refuses to run with a cryptic error message:

A required security module can not be activated.
This program can not be executed (13001).

I figured that I can't be the only one having this problem, so I Googled and couldn't really find anyone that's seen this message since 2009 or so with SecuROM in older games. Not a single report of this issue in Dragon Age II was to be found.

I poked through EA's support site and it suggested contacting their Live Chat to try to troubleshoot. Much as I expected I was urged to try closing all programs, disabling services, uninstalling emulation and debugging software, etc. This was all stuff I had tried, and nothing seemed to help.

As I was about ready to give up in frustration, I thought maybe I could try to use a program like Process Explorer to see what kind of things the Release Check utility was loading and what files it had open. At first I couldn't seem to get the utility to pull up anything on the threads tab, but then after about 30 seconds the display loaded and one of the threads stuck out: "AirfoilInject3.dll"

Airfoil is a nifty program which can take any fairly normal audio playback in a Windows program and redirect that audio through a stream to an AirTunes device, such as my Airport Express.

I never gave much thought to how it accomplished this; I just enjoyed the magic. However, I have seen it crash applications in the past and had to add exclusions accordingly to disable "Instant Hijack."

I've now learned a bit about how the magic works. Instant Hijack sets its DLL to be included under the AppInit_DLLs registry value found at "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\Windows." When the value of LoadAppInit_DLLs is set to 1, Windows automatically causes the loader to pull in the listed DLLs. I suspect this would most commonly be used for debugging or tracing without needing to attach an on-demand debugger. The Airfoil DLL intercepts common Windows sound functions with wrappers that allow the Airfoil application to redirect the sound streams to use at it sees fit.

It turns out that this Release Check utility sees this extra thread encroaching on it and freaks out and refuses to run. The solution I used was to temporarily uninstall Airfoil. I thought about trying an exclusion, but I'm not sure it would have worked. The DLL would still have been auto-loaded, even if it was doing nothing. My guess is that the Release Check utility would still freak out upon seeing an unexpected DLL attached to its process.

After removing Airfoil, I had to reboot to clear the AppInit_DLLs value. Until I did, every program would generate an error at startup that it was unable to find the DLL. After the reboot, everything was fine. The game was able to confirm it had been released, it started and it seems to run beautifully.

I've since reinstalled Airfoil. Once the game gets past the Release Check once, it doesn't seem to need to check again, and the game itself doesn't mind the extra DLL.

It may be that the game periodically attempts to reactivate, especially if your hardware changes significantly. If this happens regularly, it could prove to be very annoying.

I doubt there are too many people in this boat, but maybe this post will be interesting to someone else, so here it is!

On an related note, it appears that DA2 strongly favors DirectX 11 to enable some of its best visual features, which has got me seriously considering biting the bullet and getting Windows 7. I had hoped that by the time games stopped catering to Windows XP, gaming in Linux (natively or via WINE) would have come far enough I could just drop Windows entirely. I have said I hoped never to purchase another version of Windows again.... but perhaps it will happen.

I'm not sure it's worth it for DA2 alone, but I fear this is a sign I might not be able to hold onto XP much longer.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

[Comments: 0] 1:55 AM - Incremental Adjustments

I decided there's really no reason to start over with things, so I'm making a few incremental fixes, such as removing the CSS theme selector, which no longer works properly in modern browsers. That experiment is done, I think.

I settled on the new color scheme and layout that I had "in development" previously (for several years). If you have any suggestions, let me know. The logo needs to be recolored yet, since it doesn't really match the new colors.

I still need to update some pages and probably delete a few!

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

[Comments: 3] 3:10 AM - begin-again

This site is stale and broken and I think I might like to start blogging again. Don't be too surprised if all this goes away and is replaced by something else soon!

Sunday, April 20, 2008

[Comments: 0] 3:40 AM - firefox-3-is-in-my-way

Firefox version 3.0 has implemented a new user "protection" feature which forces phishing scam reports and SSL certificate mismatch errors to be full page messages which completely block access to the page. I can accept the phishing scam feature because it is possible to disable the warnings entirely if they bother you.

The SSL error page, to its credit, allows you to bypass it if you like, as there are some sites which legitimately use an SSL certificate that cannot be fully verified. I see the types of cases where this happens daily in my line of work. The problem is, the old verification method from 2.x and below resulted in up to two dialog boxes, in which the defaults were to accept the issue and continue with a single click each. In orther words, two clicks total. The new behavior requires no less than five clicks:

  1. Click the link which un-hides the button that allows you to add an exception.
  2. Click the button to add an exception.
  3. Click the button in the new window to re-fetch the certificate that it didn't like.
  4. Click the button to add the exception.
  5. Reload the page.

This assumes that the new window that pops up already contains the URL you tried to go to, which sometimes seems not to be the case and causes you to have to type and click many additional times.

I filed a bug about this, because I am not willing to accept the need to do more than double the work previously needed to access sites without fully validated certificates. The response so far seems to suggest they don't consider my use case worthy of consideration.

I know that a lot of customers of Steadfast will be frustrated by this change as well. To get a "validated" certificate, you must pay a yearly fee to have your certificate signed and then install it properly on your server. In a lot of cases, this is simply not worth the money, since an unsigned certificate still accomplishes the basic goal of encrypting the information sent to and from the system. I consider the idea of trusting some random set of "certificate authorities" to arbitrate who is and is not to be trusted by me based solely on who is willing to pay them up to hundreds of dollars per year a bit of a scam. I believe that self-signing of certificates ought to be an acceptable practice for users that just need encryption and don't need any fancy "seal of approval" from a mystery corporation.

That said, the reasoning for the more complex blocking of the page is somewhat sound from Mozilla's standpoint. Users can sometimes be victims of "man-in-the-middle" attacks, in which someone manages to get a computer in between the user and the real server, allowing them to create an encrypted but compromised session. In such a case, it would be less likely that the destination would happen to have a validated certificate (though it's not impossible and thus this does not actually guarantee anyone's safety when using SSL). For most users, adding a five-click exception is fine once in a while, but when you need to do this many, many times a day like I do, this is a major irritation and impedes workflow.

The way to solve it is simple. I'd like a way to specify a set of network address ranges to which these certificate verification steps do not apply. However, it seems as though Firefox developers are not going to help me out, so I decided to find a quick way to reduce the number of clicks to a predictable two or fewer. I have found that it's pretty easy to edit the Firefox "chrome" to do so. There are only two files that affect this user interface, called "netError.xhtml" and "exceptionDialog.js" and changing the behavior was simple, though for the purposes of getting what I want, I didn't really care to make sure I did things "the right way."

I edited netError.xhtml to eliminate the first click. netError.xhtml is found in the "toolkit.jar" file in your Firefox home directory (it's just a zip file) at the path content/global/. The changes I made are here. I edited exceptionDialog.js to eliminate the third and fifth clicks. exceptionDialog.js is found in the "pippki.jar" file (also a zip file) within content/pippki/. The changes I made to it are here.

After doing this, I repackaged the updated files back inside their respective jar files. As a side note, you can also eliminate click number 4 if you add a line that reads "addException();" directly below the line "checkCert();" which will make the first click add the exception with no further prompts. I didn't do this because I want the chance to review the certificate, should I run into a site on which an unvalidated certificate actually bothers me.

If Mozilla does not want to fix this problem for me, I may consider maintaining the adjustments an an extension. However, I'm not familiar with Firefox extensions or the work needed to replace "built-in" files using extensions, so if anyone wants to save me the work of RTFMing, and give me some advice or a working extension, I won't complain. :)

For now, at least I have a solution that works to avoid so many unnecessary extra clicks.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

[Comments: 0] 5:36 AM - birthday

The earth has made it around the sun about 26 times now since I was born. I didn't really have any plans for the day, but I have to thank my friend Steph for insisting that I should do something. We ended up meeting up on the north side with Karl for some pizza and bowling and a good time was had.

Now that I am 26... I am no longer 25! Hmm...

Thanks to anyone that sent a happy birthday wish or a gift via any media. :)

There are a few things of note I think:

For some reason my iPod Mini had long ago stopped working or charging correctly. When I dug it out from my boxes of belongings, I couldn't even get it to be detected as by the computer, but then I left it plugged in for 10 days and it magically started to work again. I don't believe iPods can heal, but this one seems to. Now that it works again, I can take my music along with me again on planes, trains, and in automobiles!

My sister gave me a PSP game called "Atari Classics Evolved" for my birthday. I am really enjoying this game so far because it includes Pong, Centipede, Lunar Lander, Super Breakout, Warlords, and a number of other amazingly cool Atari games in both original and "evolved" (modernized) forms. The modern forms are a lot of fun, as are the classes, but I have one complaint: The D-Pad does acceleration when you hold it down. This makes the place a paddle stops when I try to move it back and forth frequently difficult to time properly, and in the classic versions of the game, nearly impossible to control stop in the middle of the screen. I am getting the hang of it though and enjoying the results!

I just finally got the last of my utilities switched over (or I should say that I "applied" to have switched over). My power service with ComEd apparently has to go through about a 5 step review process. The first two steps happen in about 10 minutes, then the third step automatically fails, and has to be processed manually, which takes up to 5 days. Step 2 is the "acceptance" of the order and step 3 is the "processing" of the order. After step 3, you get a confirmation email, and in mine I've been told that my account number is a string of 9s. This seems wrong. Supposedly I will find now that my account will become active and I will then be billed, but I am not yet convinced this will happen. How can an electric company (or any company) be this disorganized and slow?

Finally and somewhat to my glee, John McCain is now the Republican nominee for president of the United States. He's the most acceptable viable candidate I saw on that side, and I am content to vote for him. Now all that remains is to decide the Democratic nomination. I do not think I can vote for Clinton, so I am pulling for Obama to win, and the numbers seem to strongly suggest that he can clinch the nomination with only a few modest wins and that it will be nearly impossible for Hillary to do so unless she wins big in several. If this race turns out to be McCain vs. Obama, I'll be very excited. I have a feeling that we can look forward to some very honorable campaigns with real ideas, interesting and thoughtful debates, and a generally high level of discourse we're owed from presidential candidates. I don't think Hillary knows how to do this and I don't know that she's level-headed enough to carry the country in the new direction she claims to intend to take it.

Friday, February 29, 2008

[Comments: 1] 4:05 AM - wonderful-words

For some reason, the word "ridiculous" has recently become an important part of my vocabulary. I always knew this word existed and how to use it, but I generally didn't think to use it when an opportunity arose. I would say something was "absurd" or "crazy" or "nuts" instead of "ridiculous."

On some date, fairly recently, someone used the word in a conversation with me and from that point on it seems to have become the first word I can think of to describe something absurd. I feel that much I encounter is, in fact, ridiculous and now I have trouble managing not to use the word constantly.

I've actually been trying to force myself to use alternatives to avoid sounding like I favor the word especially, but I do. Why do I like this word so much suddenly? Why is it that nearly anything that happens that I find preposterous, I am compelled to call it ridiculous?

It's ridiculous.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

[Comments: 0] 5:47 AM - holy-crap-I've-moved-in

It really did happen. I closed on my condo on January 25th, 2008 and I am now officially a home owner, in the sense that I own 15% of this home and 85% belongs to Wells Fargo Home Mortgage. Regardless, this whole place is mine, and it is already largely unpacked and organized.

I still have a few bins of stuff that needs to be disbursed around the condo, but it's the stuff I don't really use or need, and I'm on the verge of just dumping it down the trash chute to make my life easier. Probably won't do that though. :)

Anyway, I moved in on the Saturday following the closing with Curt's assistance. The following week, my dad drove in with some items from Long Island I wanted to take and he helped me settle in further. We managed to get in a washer/dryer unit and additional storage and wired everything I have up in appropriate ways. My parents and sister are on their way back here later today to help me decorate and organize even more, so I should have a busy weekend, bleeding into early next week.

There are few issues with the place, though the most worthy of note is that the floor is uneven in some areas and has some flexing, indicating there's space under the floor. I have a work order in, but they're taking their time getting it repaired. I'll keep on them until it's fixed. I don't want to have my floors go bad in a few years because the construction people didn't put things together properly.

Nothing else is really new. I've been immersed in the condo project since it finally began, only 4 - 6 months past its original delivery date, and I haven't really gotten to too much else. Give me a few more weeks and perhaps I can get into a stable routine that lends itself to more fun stuff.

There are some pictures of the place hiding somewhere. The ones from the 21st are from the walk through, the 30th represent the initial organization, and the 5th show it roughly as it is now, though it's gotten significantly less cluttery since. I am also not still sitting there waving in the direction of the television.

I have a new local phone number and an address. If you need them, check my Facebook profile or email me!

Sunday, January 20, 2008

[Comments: 0] 3:13 AM - really-really-moving-soon

My attorney finally confirmed with the developer that the fifth floor is ready to close and scheduled my closing tentatively for January 30th at 2 PM. In order to speed this up, I checked in with my mortgage consultant and confirmed that there would be no problem with moving up the closing to the 25th instead.

I have a walk through scheduled for Monday morning at 11 AM in which I will be able to inspect the unit and confirm it meets the requirements and specifications of what I am purchasing. If everything proves to be in good order, I will aim to proceed with the closing on the 25th as planned with a likely attempt to move in on Saturday.

This could really, really mean I'm moving into my own (owned) home in a week! I am so excited and nervous at this point that I'm going to probably have a fairly restless week.

I just started making final preparations, including transferring money needed to bring to the closing, as well as getting together insurance, and I will have to schedule TV and Internet hookups soon.

I've been waiting 4 to 6 months for this all to finally come together and it seems at this time it's really happening. If you might read this and be around on Saturday and want to help me move my stuff, let me know. :)

Time to own something that costs more than I make in a year! Yay! :)

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But wait... There's more! Jump back in time a month or two and take a look at what I had to say then. It'll make me happy. Isn't that reason enough?