Common Sense 4 Common People

Microsoft update KB967723 installation error

For days now Vista has been bugging me about an update that just would not install (KB967723).
Even if I would shutdown the machine, it would just try and fail.
And not simply fail... but give me an amazing error code (80070490) which to cut a long story short meant that some internal database of updates was corrupt and I had to repair installation from the Vista CD. What???? Over my dead body!

Can you see the big picture here? I was minding my own business and one more Digital Misfortune came my way uninvited. But don't get me wrong here. If there is ONE technological feat that I admire in this world that is Microsoft Update. I just can believe such a thing is working. One major screw up (or security breach) and millions of computers can become unusable; just the security requirements of this blew my mind away... So I forgive them some glitches.

Anyway, since I had to debug this issue, I thought I might as well write a couple of lines about it, so that other poor souls like me might get a better chance when searching for an answer.

By searching the net and reading other posts I found some people mentioning that in similar situations they downloaded the standalone installer for the update and surprisingly enough it installed without problems.
Now that should ring some bells...
It is a seemingly non-rational action but it often has results.
So I downloaded the standalone installer for KB967723 and bingo! It installed and problem solved :-)
Isn't digital life so sweet?

Have Fun!
Dimitris Staikos

Too much power management can kill you

QUIZ
You can tell that something is wrong when:

1. Something that usually takes half an hour is not finished after 5 hours OR
2. Yet another piece of technology is functioning in unintended ways.

A couple of days ago I read a tip about 4 mistakes that can kill VM performance.
#4 was: The default power option of Windows Server 2008 upon installation is set to "Balanced".
Sure as hell it was set to Balanced, so I corrected that one.
But tonight something else happened that was related to power management.
A backup to network folder was taking far too long.
How nice... One more problem to solve...
I check the network utilization and see that it was 100%.
Now that's a bit unusual... Just a bit...
I take a better look and what do I see?
Link Speed 10Mbps!!!!!
Excuse me??? Where did that come from?
To cut a long story short, the Intel network adapters came with a default setting that made them reduce the link speed if the machine is idle. The machine was certainly not idle, but still the link speed was reduced... go figure.
I deactivated the setting and got back my 1Gbps with a healthy 30% utilization and my backup was finished in the next 10 minutes.

That's why I say too much power management will kill you...

Have Fun!
Dimitris Staikos

Irrational By Design

Compared to the average person I would probably rank as a pretty experienced computer user. This unfortunately means (and that’s not Windows specific) that I am often expected to take irrational actions in order to produce the desired outcome. Lately, more often than not, the desired outcome falls under the label "Troubleshoot a Digital Misfortune".

There is a small problem with semantics here, as the concept of Expected Irrational Behavior that Leads to a Desired Outcome is a self-destructing concept. Have many people repeat any behavior often enough for long enough and in the end it will be considered rational... Or maybe not? I don’t know. I am confused here...

To make matters even worse, obviously any of these irrational behaviors is really only seemingly irrational. Somewhere under the hood there is a good reason why it works, but as far as I am concerned as long as we don’t know that reason the behavior remains irrational. And even when we know the reasons, all too often we get the "this behavior is by design" disclaimer. It should really say that "this behavior is by irrational design".

Digital Misfortunes: Off-the-shelf end-user product mafia

Happy New Year everyone :-)

Although I planned to kick off 2009 with a much more inspiring article, I finally couldn't help it. I bumped onto a Digital Misfortune of such proportions that it was just impossible to resist the temptation.

Either it's me who is totally stupid or indeed software nowadays is designed by a blood-thirsty sadist mafia that plans to rule the world by killing all intelligent beings, or to be more exact, leading them to willfully commit suicide by banging their head on a wall, unable to stand the stupidity that surrounds them any longer. Some rock band had a song called "Mandatory Suicide"; now I think I finally get their message.

Digital Misfortunes: Remote desktop messes up keyboard layout of logon screen

It seems that lately I have been having a peak of digital troubles, which I have come to call "Digital Misfortunes". These are situations where programs or computers do not behave in the expected way and I have to utilize the "supernatural" powers that device driver development has given me in order to solve these problems.

So, since these things seem to happen more and more often I have created a new category in my blog, with that name exactly.

It really makes me sad to see that more and more problems keep coming up. What would a normal user do? Format and reinstall the OS? Most likely...

How violating KISS can end up in 100% CPU usage by your antivirus

Hi all,

I have been using an antivirus/firewall product on 4 of my computers, 2 desktops and 2 laptops, for more than a year without any troubles and was more than happy for the money I paid for it.

However at some moment I noticed that the my IBM ThinkPad X41 was extremely slow. Process Explorer would show CPU utilization being constantly at 100% and the culprit was the executable of the antivirus software.

If I disabled the antivirus real-time protection then CPU went down to normal. When I reenabled it then back to 100%.

To start with I left the laptop open for a couple of days so maybe the antivirus would get done with something it was doing but of course that was a silly thought without results. Then I tried to uninstall and reinstall it but this was just another silly thought and of course the problem remained.

So I decided to use the artillery. I opened up Process Monitor by SysInternals just to take a look at what the antivirus was doing.

Suprise!

It was scanning over and over a 9MB html file!

The location of this file?
C:\Program Files\ThinkPad\ConnectUtilities and the name of it AddConnAdvanced.html

So I added this file to the exclusion list and my laptop became normal again.

I thought maybe my laptop downloaded some software update that screwed things up, so I decided to look at what could a 9MB html file possibly hold...

Surprise (again)!

It was the IBM diagmostics utility debug log...

Then I remembered... I had a problem with the wifi on the laptop about two months ago. So I turned on the debug diagnostics and of course forgot it on even after I solved the problem.

It seems that the IBM developers wanted to appear slick I guess, so a .TXT file was not good enough for them but instead they output an HTML file which eventually gets huge, it is an HTML file so it gets scanned by adivirus software because it might be malicious, ending up in a frustrated user >:( .
Bravo! Way to go!

I do device driver development for a living and as a result I have a "lean and mean" mentality, some also call it KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). I just hate it when people use HTML/XML for something that could be done with a plain txt, or use .NET for a config utility because they want to add a silly jpg on the dialog and don't know how to do this in plain Win32.

Things are simple: When you do more than you absolutely have to, then you increase your application's "problem surface". More and more things can go wrong and you DON'T want things to go wrong with low level stuff like debug logs and config utilities.

To understand the extent of this problem, that is doing more than you have to just because it is cool, be amused to know that some PhD guys that obviously hadn't do much programming in their lives, designed a camera specification called Genicam, and designed a feature by which the camera could send to the application a file that describes in a standard format all of its settings. This "standard" format of course was XML and everybody was so happy and cool. Of course the time came to write a device driver for such a camera and guess what? How on earth do you fit an XML parser in kernel mode code? Only if you want to play cowboy and device driver developers usually don't have much free time to play cowboy. Using XML, which is user mode crap, for some simple text information that NEVER changes is against KISS.

Dude, do I hear someone saying "but what about schema validation etc"??? We are not talking about a file that got created by a user. We are talking about a file that gets stored inside a camera by the manufacturer. IT BETTER BE IN THE CORRECT FORMAT.

Anyway, although the antivirus is not to blame for my troublesome situation, but it would help if they provided some statistics screen/report with the most scanned files so we can solve such problems in an easier way, without using super natural powers.

Tip: If a similar thing happens to your PC and it is so slow that it is almost unusable because a process is taking 100% CPU and you don't want to kill the process (so that you can study what is going on) then try lowering the process priority of the offending process. This will permit you to use your computer again so that you can solve the problem.

Have fun,
Dimitris Staikos