February 2011, links

WiX v3.5 with Votive that supports Visual Studio 2010 has been released.

The Bugzilla Project announced the release of Bugzilla 4.0. News topic.

Kippo is a medium interaction SSH honeypot designed to log brute force attacks and, most importantly, the entire shell interaction performed by the attacker. Hosted on Google Code.

Honeyd is a small honeypot daemon that creates virtual hosts on a network.

CodeProject’s famous writer Sacha Barber starts article series about Task Parallel Library, Task Parallel Library part 2.

Larry Osterman is writing about: The case of the inconsistent right shift results in C/C++ on 32-bit and 64-bit machines.

Security lesson: The inside story of the HBGary hack.

Debian’s The Computer Language Benchmarks Game.

Visual C++ Team Blog continues series with – Advanced STL, Part 1.

Right click context menu on wrong side afer installing Service Pack 1 for Windows 7

Today after updating my Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit with Service Pack 1, I noticed, that almost all Right click context menus (for example on Desktop) are on wrong side – left side of mouse pointer instead of right side.

It turns out, that Service Pack somehow changed my Windows settings. To get back the old behavior:
Click on Windows button and type “Tablet PC Settings”. Press enter. Now open “Other” tab, and change Right-handed to Left-handed as shown in screenshot.

Stress test my Video card to reproduce driver crash

One of my video cards kept crashing and showing various artifacts. Usually this happened when playing youtube.com videos or using DirectX. Video card was GIGABYTE nVidia GTX 460.

When crashing, Windows temporary disabled both monitors / displays and, then balloon tip appeared showing:
[Display driver stopped responding and has recovered]
Display driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 266.58 stopped responding and has successfully recovered.

I tried to reproduce this error by opening and playing various video files, including youtube, but without any luck. I couldn’t reproduce this with 100% probability. And after one crash, it was very hard to crash driver again in a reasonable timeframe.

Today, I thought, that I need some way to stress test my video card. One software that I run was Video Card Stability Test from freestone-group.com. Another was famous Stress test – FurMark from ozone3d.net. Both tests crashed my video card constantly within few seconds.

Now changed my video card to another nVidia GTX 460 made by SPARKLE and all problems have gone away.

P.S. Temperature was in normal level when driver crashed – ~50 °C.

P.S.S. Windows Event log was logging multiple: “Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.” events.