This is a fork of Barry Haanstra’s PuTTY Tray, which is abandoned.

Main advantages:

• Now built against PuTTY 0.61, getting features like Windows 7 Jumplist and Aero support, and four years of core PuTTY development
• Ctrl+mousewheel zoom support
• URL detection works on URLs ending with close-brackets
• Much easier to continue development of, build script generator works and source, issue and pull-request tracking provided by github.

Please raise a bug if you have any problems or requests!

It, however, leaks memory. A lot of memory; about 1kb/second. Noting that it’s running all the time, and not important, this is rather inconvenient.

FTFY. Can’t redistribute a patched “binary” as the original is not redistributable.

All are in the tinies v001 archive, in both x64 and legacy format. Symbols, source and signatures are available. No installer is available; just drop them into your All Programs -> Startup folder.

shiftfocus.exe adds an extra set of hotkeys for focusing windows. Ctrl+win+arrow focuses the window to that side of the current window.

This makes the most sense with Aero’s Snap turned on. If you have two windows “half-maximised” on a screen (i.e. one has been win+left‘d, and the other win+right‘d), then you can switch between them using ctrl+win+left and ctrl+win+right.

topkey.exe adds win+w to toggle a windows’ always-on-top flag, and win+return to create a new command prompt “in the current directory”. (This works for Explorer windows, and things that have the directory at the start of the title, i.e. Notepad++.)

mousex.exe allows you to use an xbox360 controller as a mouse. Different analogue sticks are different sensitivity. A/B for left/right click. Shoulder analogue controls for the scrollwheel.

And, for more niche users:

powerstatustray.exe shows which drives are spun-up, and notifies you when a drive spins up or down. (Yes, actually, this one was released before.)

keydump.exe shows what you can keylog by binding globally to DirectInput. Most keylogging preventers/detectors completely ignore this, and/or only work through blacklisting, which is laughably pointless. It doesn’t bother translating numbers into keycaps, but it’s obvious whether it’s working and whether it’s been detected.

Others, to date:

• aukiller: Legacy XP application.
• foobar2000-loader.exe: Demo of pre-loading a dll into an application via the debug api.
• keytoputty.exe: Take input and send it to a running instance of putty, i.e. to allow input during full-screen applications.
• loaddlls.exe just calls LoadLibrary on all it’s arguments.
• noelev.exe: Legacy implementation of setting __COMPAT_LAYER=RunAsInvoker.
• quickkey.exe: Legacy XP application.
• unrequireadmin.exe: An even less healthy implementation of noelev.exe.

The Google Earth download is actually just a cunningly disguised Google Update installer, and it seems to think it needs elevation.

It extracts %TEMP%\GUXXXXX.tmp\GoogleUpdate.exe, then tries to run:

GoogleUpdate.exe /install "appguid={74AF07D8-FB8F-4d51-8AC7-927721D56EBB}&appname=Google%20Earth&needsadmin=true" /installelevated

Instead of this,

GoogleUpdate.exe /install "appguid={74AF07D8-FB8F-4d51-8AC7-927721D56EBB}&appname=Google%20Earth"

..will happily download and extract Google Earth to %TEMP%\7ZipSfx.XXX. This is the unpacked offline installer, but the installer itself still attempts to elevate. Luckily, it’s already unpacked, in:

%TEMP%\7ZipSfx.XXX\program files\Google\Google Earth

Just copy this folder to somewhere convenient and run googleearth.exe.

–

For reference for other apps, the quoted argument to GoogleUpdate.exe is the last “line” in the downloaded GoogleEarthSetup.exe.

I thought it’d be fun to directly fix the problem.

It seems that, like some other things, as far as I can see, there’s no support for this.

Luckily, it’s an even smaller patch than last time. I won’t show it, it’s simply erasure of a jmp. It’s a terrible solution to the problem, and the binary only contains fixes for kernel32.dll as seen on x64 SP1 and x32 SP1 as of now, it could break at any point. I implore nobody to use this utility seriously.

noelev (asc) (cpp) (pdb) works much like the reverse of the unix “sudo” command, running a command via. it makes it run without elevation.

It’s not infectious, so it won’t work for all applications (like some setup applications that unpack other installers), and, of course, some applications actually don’t work without elevation.

A lot of Windows components actually appear to cope relatively gracefully with the unexpected lack of permissions, unlike, say, the nVidia components. I was hoping to find an entertaining failure to screenshot, but they’re all boring.

Currently, it’s fully read-only, so there’s minimal risk to your data, and the default install doesn’t cause you to lose any existing functionality.

The list of supported properties shows what the default handler supports for MP3 and WMA, and what TLPH supports so far.

This release comes after four months of swearing at Microsoft for the entire property handler system being impossible to debug. Four months ago I had the handler working in Windows Explorer, but Windows Search would refuse to show any properties it provided. There’re plenty of articles on debugging this situation, which I ran through hundreds of times, in the end this turned out to be caused by:

1. Explorer accepting VT_BSTR and Windows Search not; solved by switching to InitPropVariantFromString.
2. Stupid mistakes with pointers. Oh, how I hate you.

I’m trying to learn the Colemak keyboard layout again, I’ve produced a version of Colemak with more UK symbol keys (self extractor) (.asc) on (for example, “, @, ¬ in the right places). MSKLC 1.4 source included, should work on XP and Vista.

I wrote a tool a while ago for a friend show whether drives were spun up or not. I just changed it to a little tray applet:

It also notifies you when drives spin down and up. Currently it operates by polling, at a hardcoded 15s interval. Feel free to change the source.

powerstatustray.exe (.asc) (.cpp) (.pdb).

It happily scanned away, deleting three copies of the deadly EICAR virus (phew), this was (mostly) fine.

Following this, and OneCare assuring me that my system was free of viruses, spyware and other malware, awarded me the security status Fair:

The “problem” found was, apparently, that I have chosen to disable elevation upon “setup detection”, a feature built into Vista (disableable via. Local Security Policy -> UAC: Detect Application Installs..) by Microsoft in a cunning plan to ensure that lazy software developers didn’t need to bother learning how manifests work, and instead could just rename their application to “setup.exe” and pray. There is no way to ignore this “problem”.

The second “problem” was that I do not use OneCare (nor optical media, as it happens) for my backups. This renders the overall “security” status useless.

Next irritation comes from the attempt to use the internet. OneCare blocks outgoing connections from unisnged (it costs £40 and an e-mail address to get a code-signing certificate via. Tucows, making this a terribly poor way to decide what to trust) apps by default (well, I hope, I couldn’t work out how to turn it off), and shows the following dialog:

That’s conforting, a shielded task dialog. I’ll click Allow on Opera’s prompt and… wait, what’s this?!

I’m confused. Didn’t I just say Opera was allowed through?

Also, a warning: Don’t try the bottom button. It blocks the application for an indeterminate, unresettable period. Really inconvenient when you’re attempting to use said application to write a blog report.

If you hadn’t guessed by now, I don’t like OneCare’s UI. To sum it up:

This is the dialog that you see when you restore OneCare from the system tray. No, not load from scratch. Restore. And, just in case you were worried, that’s not a progress bar, it’s just an “I’m doing stuff, honest!” bar.

Ignoring all those (and a few other bugs), it seems to be a very capable bit of software. Maybe you’re less irritable than me, go try the 90 day free trial!

In short, if you use or know about an application that adds rating information to files, please tell me about it. Currently, I’ve only really looked at some apps that are bundled with Windows and foo_rating‘s behaviour.

Windows asks that the rating be specified in a range between zero (unrated) and 100 (five stars), with a curiously un-even scale in the middle. It also offers the capability to return a simple rating; the number of stars (out of five).

This is fine, until you realise that there seems to be no standard, defacto or otherwise, for the range of values or the location to write rating information in the file*.

Based on the limited sample above, the code I committed attempts to find a tag named “rating” in the file, and takes it’s integer value. If it is below five, it is used as a star rating, if it’s below 100, it’s used directly, and if it’s below 255, it’s mapped onto the 100 range. While this effectively deals with the cases I have encountered so far, it is, obviously, full of discontinuities. After the above mapping function, the input 4 is greater than everything below 75 (the value used to represent four stars), etc.

This should allow apps that follow the Windows (percentage) standard and the “number of stars” standard to coexist happily, but may cause strange issues when unexpected rating systems are used.
Unfortunately, even if I’m aware of curious rating systems, there’s little I can do about them, as, at this point in the code only the current file is visible, not others in the set (directory etc.). If someone is using 0 -> 10, everything six and above is going to show as one star.

(* The exception to this is, of course, id3v2, which specifies the POPM (“popularimeter”, 4.17) tag, which contains an octet value (0->255) for a user rating. I have never seen an app that writes these, nor a file containing them, and, as such, id3v2 files go through the same process as everything else as a fallback.)

Taglib supports (so far) ogg (vorbis), flac, oga, mpc, wv, spx, tta, mp3 and wma. The last two have some support in Windows, however, support for id3v2.4 in mp3 files is lacking.

Currently, it works best under Vista (either 32-bit or 64-bit). XP (even with Windows Desktop Search installed) seems not to be interested in the properties I have to offer. The installer (intentionally) completely does not work under XP.

Any comments welcome, but this is an alpha, and, even though there is (nearly) no risk to your files or your system stability, it’s possible that something is horribly broken.