It seems it’s not just Windows that can cause embarrassing crashes. I spotted this the other night in a store window – their Mac OS X app had crashed and their TV was showing the following message:

I actually forget the name of the app that had been running, and the photo isn’t much good. I have seen it running before, and it’s just one of those Flash-like ads.

There's been another update to DblClk, but this one wasn't made by me. It was made by the very talented (well, more talented than me!) Andrew.

This version was written in MASM assembler, and compiles down to just 1 kilobyte (which is actually the minimum size of a PE executable).

Along with this version is a slight change in behaviour. Instead of uninstalling the hook by running it again with the –exit command-line parameter, you uninstall the hook simply by running the program a second time. This is probably more useful that the way I had it originally anyway.

I haven't tried this version myself yet (my laptop doesn't have a middle-mouse button) but I'll be sure to install it at work tomorrow.

You can download the new version here: dblclk-2.0.zip

If anyone has any problems, comment them here and I'll be sure to pass it along. Thanks a lot Andrew, great job!

We were having this strange problem today where an SqlDependency that we set up would mysteriously stop working after a short while (maybe 5 minutes or so). What would happen is, you'd set up the SqlDepedency, and for about 5 minutes or so, everything would be fine. The dependency would fire if we changed the corresponding row(s) in the database.

But if we left things alone for about 5 minutes and went back, the dependency stopped firing, and we never got an error!

It took some searching, but I finally stumbled across this bug, which pointed me to KB 913364. After downloading the hotfix (luckily, it wasn't one that I had to call to download!) it was fixed!

It's pretty well-known that public transport in my home-town of Sydney is not all that great. I mean, I used to live in the western suburbs, but got so sick of catching the train that I started driving to work – even with all the traffic, it took about the same time, and I didn't have to put up with hot, smelly, overcrowded trains. But eventually, I got sick of driving and decided to move closer. Now I live about 10 minutes by bus away (or 25 minutes walk – which I usually do, if it's not too cold... or hot, hehe).

But even that is not made easy by Sydney buses. You see, the bus that runs past my work to my house is so full, more often than not, that it drives past without stopping!

Today, I had enough. After not one but two buses in a row drove past without stopping (actually, one stopped to let people off, but the driver didn't open the front door and patently refused to acknowledge me knocking on the front door), I called 131 500 and lodged a complaint.

The lady on the other end was very friendly, and the whole complaint was over in a couple of minutes. She took my name and phone number and told me that she's pass my "comment" (tirade, I'd say) to the depot manager. So let's see how we go, eh? If I hear any more, or there's any change, I'll be sure to post an update.

I've been having this really strange problem, and it's been happening over the last several months. You see, every now and then, I'd look in the root folder of my 'C' drive, and there'd be this file called "trace.txt" that was filled with 0 (zeros). Usually, I would just delete the file and move on. But then I'd come back days later, and the bugger would be back, and it would have all these zeros in it again.

So I started to get a bit annoyed. I mean, it wasn't a huge problem (it would add maybe half a dozen zeros a day, so it's not like it was filling up my hard drive or anything), but it was still a problem. Also, I didn't know what was creating the file in the first place!

So, I whipped out my trusty FileMon, set it to only display "trace.txt" and let it run...

Well, it only took a couple of hours before the first entries showed up – for explorer.exe! Obviously, explorer.exe in it's default installed wouldn't do something so obnoxious, so it must've been one of the myriad of shell extensions I have installed doing it.

So now, I whip out my trusty Process Explorer, open up the modules view for explorer.exe and have a look at all the yellow-highlighted rows (which indicate images that have been rebased: I figured any programmer lousy enough to write to a file in the root directory without my knowledge would have to be lousy enough to also not rebase their shell extension DLL). Simply right-clicked on each, selected "Properties..." went to the Strings tab and did a "Find..." for "trace.txt"

Ah HA! I found it, the string "C:\trace.txt"

I found it in a shell extension provided by the demo edition of "HHD Hex Editor," which I must've downloaded ages ago to look at a binary file or something. I can't even remember why I downloaded it now... but it looks like it had a hard-coded reference to the file "C:\trace.txt". I don't know why, but I wonder what would have happened if I'd set trace.txt's security properties to deny write access to my account? Or if I didn't have a C: drive at all?

Anyway, suffice to say, I've removed the offending software, and I don't think I'll bother to try any of the newer versions.