kichik.net

Stargate is off for “fall break”. Seasons of 4400, The Shield and House have all ended. Nothing to watch on TV anymore. Well, except for the news, but that show has been airing reruns for so long it’s a arguably laughable. Now and then they find something semi-new, like the latest Thai coup. But overall, it’s almost always the same episodes over and over again.

If already on the subject, does the completion of “Carter & McKay’s intergalactical bridge” mean SG-1 will finally see some digital stargates? And is it just me or 4400 is becoming more and more X-men’ish with each passing episode? Too bad for Kenny Johnson, I think he really liked the first episode…

Well, more time for rest & recreation or beer & beach I guess… Too bad summer is on the brink of destruction almost over.

The modern technological world is all about faster and smaller these days. New acronyms pop-up daily. It’d probably be an understatement saying an average technology related sentence contains at least 3 abbreviation of some kind, be it an acronym or just a simple abbreviation. It’s deeply embedded in us, there’s no running away from it. We are so used to it, we normally don’t even recognize an abbreviation when we see it. They are just normal words for us.

I really like exploiting this when I’m bored or when I’m writing long official documents, especially those I don’t want to write. Instead of talking or writing like every other human being on the planet, I expand every possible abbreviation to the longest form available. It drives people nuts. Not only do they need to read more, they need to think longer and reabbreviate the words. Some expansions, people don’t even recognize and have to come back for an explanation.

That’s the time abbreviations become a total absurd - when people don’t even know the original meaning. Then you get redundant definitions like YWMT (sounds better in Hebrew) which stands for yellow white marking tape. No one knows or cares the W in WMT stands for white. WMT is just a marking tape for everybody. So when in need of an abbreviation for a yellow marking tape, it’s just called yellow WMT or YWMT.

The new Windows Vista, filled with shiny new features, hyped on security, and runs dead slow and with no sound on Virtual PC. I should have installed it on a real computer, but that’s a different story. This post is all about Vista’s love towards NSIS. Vista loves NSIS so much, it mentions it in no less than kernel32.dll. Well, I might be reading too much into it. It also has Gentee, InstallShield, Raphael Install Builder (what’s that?), Astrum, Inno Setup and even WinRAR.

But why? Security, what else. Vista’s new UAC asks the user to enter an administrator’s password for administrative operations, such as installing an application. Back in the old days (last Monday), one had to use runas or logout and login as an administrator in order to install an application, assuming he was running a non-administrator account. As you probably know, that’s quite annoying. Users usually use an administrator account all the time and skip this annoyance. UAC allows creating standard users with no administrative privileges and still using them comfortably, even for administrative tasks. Just like sudo for Linux or that new lock icon on Mac OS X. This way, a standard user can be used and all sorts of harm can be avoided. Malicious code accidentally executed or intentionally injected using an unpatched vulnerability will not have access to the entire computer, but rather only the user’s space.

To make it easy on the transition, Microsoft has stuffed kernel32.dll with detection code for all sorts of installers, including NSIS. When it detects an installer is being executed, it’ll automatically jump into administrative execution level, not before asking for the administrator password. A similar thing is already done older versions of Windows where an option to run as administrator is automatically presented for applications that have setup in their name.

The execution level Windows will ask from the user can be controlled by the application manifest. I started digging into this when I was adding a new command to NSIS, RequestExecutionLevel, that specifies the execution level in the manifest. I was surprised to see that even without the manifest, it still requested an administrator password. Naturally, I got curious and embarked on reckon mission to find out the nature of this newly formed relationship between NSIS and Vista. I saw most of the stuff I’ve already read about in action and those new things I just mentioned above.

However, there is one thing I couldn’t find mentioned anywhere and for which I certainly couldn’t find any logical explanation. It identifies MakeNSISw.exe, zip2exe.exe and MakeLangId.exe as something that requires administrative execution level. It also identifies the uninstaller, but that makes sense because it’s actually an installer with different strings and pages. At first, I thought it identifies every application created by another application that requires administrative execution level. I also tried installing Inno Setup and got similar results where its compiler and uninstaller were identified. But it turns out I was wrong. If, for example, I created an installer that just extracts makensis.exe (no w, the command line compiler), it’s not identified. I also downloaded MakeNSISw.exe separately and it was still identified and marked with that little Windows shield icon. I was finally convinced this is some funky bug when I saw nsisconf.nsh also comes up with that little shield icon and that’s just a text file which is not even associated with MakeNSISw.exe. Then I realized NSH files take their icon from MakeNSISw.exe and that was indeed why it’s marked with the shield.

If something as harmless as MakeLangId.exe gets labeled, I wonder what else does… I hope they fix it until RC2. Not the nicest of features. Too much on the paranoiac side…

Update: seems like MakeLangId.exe and MakeNSISw.exe are labeled because they contain the phrase “Nullsoft.NSIS” in its manifest. I don’t see why they’d want to do that. That’s just a prefix we use. Installers are marked with “Nullsoft.NSIS.exehead”, there’s no need to catch the entire package. That’s definitely enough information for a bug report.

I just had a quick look at the statistics and noticed NSIS downloads on SourceForge surpassed 1,000,000. That’s one and a half terabyte of NSIS downloads. Add a couple million page views a month taking around 17GB of bandwidth and you’ll get quite some bandwidth. So, before I sit back, relax and step on cloud nine, I’d like to thank SourceForge for their hosting for the last 4 years. I don’t even want to think about having to handle that just as a side dish to the big-shot projects that have over one million downloads a day.

I’ll sit back now. See you in 1 more million downloads

Someone linked to this cool video on IRC. The first thing I thought of when I saw the first object fall into the glass is Magnolia. More specifically, that last scene where frogs fall from the sky. I think that was a good movie, I don’t actually remember… I guess I’d have to watch it again.

Then, when I tried to figure out what exactly it was that fell from the sky, I immediately thought of shotgun shells. I imagined it’d be an anti-war or gun proliferation movie because of the context. Mini Lord of War, if you wish. How pessimistic of me.

The end reminded me of the Good Idea / Bad Idea sketches from Animaniacs, which led me to a complete list of the sketches. That was a good show. Narf!

Anyway, here’s the video.

Channel 8 had an interesting show yesterday about something I never heard of. It’s called radiation dimming and apparently it’s another side effect of us on the earth’s climate. It refers to air pollution which keeps radiation from the sun from entering the atmosphere and so keeps the earth cooler at daytime and warmer at nights. It is believed to partially mask the effect of the greenhouse gases on global warming.

So how is this dimming a bad thing? Well, while trying to undo the trouble, we maintain our focus mainly on reducing air pollution by cutting back on CFC, putting filters on just about everything and creating more resource efficient machinery. That’s all nice and dandy, but the damage has already been done and this fixes only one of these two side effects. Nature is all about balance and in this case we’ve broken the balance with air pollution, but created our own delicate balance instead. Now, while reducing air pollution, we broke the balance again. The ozone layer is still damaged, but our own “synthetic ozone layer of pollution” is slowly diminishing. Hence, while trying to fix the errors of the past for the long term, we’re actually making things worse for the short term. The greenhouse gases effect is getting stronger because its masking is slowly reduced.

The researcher the show was talking about had a nice method of proving his point. Contrails also take part of radiation dimming and the skies are filled with them. After 9/11, all flights in the USA were grounded for a couple of days. This gave him an excellent chance to test his theory and see if there’s any temperature difference when removing this polluter. And lo and behold, a difference of over 1 °C in the daily temperature variation was observed.

More information is available from BBC, Wikipedia (using the above links) and channel 8’s reruns.

Yesterday, I watched Lord of War again. It’s about a Russian guy named Yuri (Nicolas Cage), living in the USA, who gets tired of doing nothing with his life. Instead of spending the rest of his life in his parent’s restaurant, he decides to become an arms dealer.

The movie starts with a scene showing the production cycle of a 5.56mm bullet. Beginning all the way from a thin metal foil, through gun powder filling, QA and shipment, finally finding its resting place in the frontal lobe of a young African child soldier. One of the first things said in the movie is:

There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That’s one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other 11?

The name comes from something Yuri’s biggest client says.

Andre Baptiste Sr.: They say that I am the lord of war, but perhaps it is you.
Yuri Orlov: I believe it’s “warlord.”
Andre Baptiste Sr.: Thank you, but I prefer it my way.

As you might have already guessed, this isn’t exactly a happy Sunday morning movie. It’s a “well-made political drama with an excellent story and a powerful performance by Nicolas Cage”. It’s a story about the good things in life, capitalism at its best and marvelous childhood games.

They say, “Evil prevails when good men fail to act.” What they ought to say is, “Evil prevails.”

Though hardly on the lite side, the movie does have the occasional joke.

Back then, I didn’t sell to Osama Bin Laden. Not because of moral reasons, but because he was always bouncing checks.

If you haven’t already, you should watch this movie. I really liked it. Not to be political or anything, it’s just sad funny to see how good of a job we’re doing killing ourselves and everybody else.

Welcome to my blog. I’m Amir Szekely, also known as kichik. I’m a programmer living in Israel. Most of my computer time, when not at my workplace, I spend on NSIS, an open-source installer for Windows. I’ve been working on it for over 4 years and it has been quite fun.

I don’t know what type of posts you can except to find here, only time will tell. I guess it’d include the occasional NSIS techy post, maybe some tips & tricks, some rants of a perfect world, movies, games, who knows… Just in case, I’ve setup a syntax highlighting extension, so I can share some NSIS codes here and there.

Name test
OutFile test.exe
Section
SetOutPath $TEMP
File /oname=test.nsi "${__FILE__}"
Delete $TEMPtest.nsi
SectionEnd

Installing this extension and the entire blog was a piece of cake. WordPress is very easy to use, with lots of DHTML and a smooth user-interface. I’m quite impressed. Took me a while to find a nice theme, but MistyLook saved the day.

I don’t really know when, but my ISP has apparently installed a spam blocker on their servers. So instead of getting around 50 spam messages a day like I used to, I now get only one message per day. Some days even pass without a single spam message. Spam control at its best.

What does all of this have to do with Unicode? Don’t forget to breath, the answer lies short ahead…

What is Unicode then, and what does it have to do with spam? “Unicode provides a unique number for every character”, Unicode is the future of encoding. Microsoft has seen the bright and shiny future and has implemented Unicode in their Windows NT series. Fortunately, I am using Windows NT and have Unicode, I am part of this glorious future, I have the ability to read Japanese, Korean, Chinese and all sorts of weird languages I don’t understand.

Unlike the great Microsoft, my ISP has not yet seen the future. My ISP has not yet obtained the ability to read Unicode. It has yet to be enlightened. And so, instead of blocking all of the spam, it lets spam encoded with Unicode slip by and I get Viagra ads in Japanese, loan offers in Korean and stock tips in Chinese.

I feel so blessed, I have little to none spam and thanks to Microsoft who has embraced the future, I have the ability to read the spam that I do get… If only I understood Japanese, Korean and Chinese… *sigh*