Free Tool: Color Selector

Whenever I'm working on a color scheme, I often start with an image or photo to use as a basis. I will then go and suck out some of the colors I like. For the longest time I had been using a freeware tool to grab the color under the cursor, but the blasted tool had a bug which would cause it's window to blank out, and otherwise cease to function correctly.

Having finally reached my limit of patience this weekend, I went and wrote my own version of it:

Basically it shows whatever color is underneath the cursor. Pressing Alt-C will copy the RGB value onto the clipboard allowing you to paste it into your CSS file (or wherever you need the color value).

Color Grab Download (zip 160k), free to use, runs under Windows.

Benchmarking Preparation Checklist

In gathering performance metrics on a piece of software, you will want to spend some amount of effort in minimizing the noise in the system (reducing the standard deviation on the numbers collected). Here are some actions which may be beneficial in giving you tighter control of your environment.

System Preparation

• Remove any extraneous peripherals. Additional peripherals may cause hardware based interrupts to fire which can interrupt the application you are attempting to profile.
• Disconnect from the network. Incoming network requests from other systems can cause spurious events to occur. If you need network access, you may want to disconnect from a Domain which has the ability to run various tasks in the background (without your knowledge).
• Disable or pause any unnecessary services. You can programmatically pause specific services using OpenService then calling ControlService with SERVICE_CONTROL_PAUSE.
• Disable UI effects. Calling SystemParametersInfo will let you disable (and then restore) miscellaneous UI elements.

• Turn off the screen saver: SPI_SETSCREENSAVEACTIVE
• Minimize popup durations: SPI_SETMESSAGEDURATION
• Turn off blinky animations: SPI_SETCLIENTAREAANIMATION
• Remove drop shadows: SPI_SETDROPSHADOW
• Enable flat menus: SPI_SETFLATMENU
• Disable font smoothing: SPI_SETFONTSMOOTHING
• Remove the mouse shadow: SPI_SETCURSORSHADOW

Process Preparations

• Flush caches. You will want to ensure that the benchmarks start from a consistent system state. One approach is to start with all caches warmed, the other is from a cold state. For the latter, here are some APIs which can help clean things up for you, assuming you don't have the time to do a full cold reboot:

• Empty clipboard (EmptyClipboard)
• Flush registry (RegFlushKey)
• Flush file volumes (FlushFileBuffers on each volume e.g. "\\.\c:")
• The OS's file system cache (SetSystemFileCacheSize with -1)

• Close or minimize any other applications. Any process which is running may have the chance to interrupt you and aside from the time lost, it will destroy any cache coherency you've built up.
• Move all remaining processes onto a single CPU core. By isolating all the remaining processes onto core 0 (for example), we can prevent as much disruption to your process as possible. You may want to run under the SYSTEM account, otherwise you won't have permission to move some processes via SetProcessAffinityMask.
• Drop priority on any above-normal processes. We will want to run at real-time, so let us make sure that nobody else has a chance to compete for time slices (SetProcessPriorityBoost and SetPriorityClass).

Running

• Set the processor affinity. Run your application on a core which it has all to itself.
• Set priority to real-time. Max out the scheduler priority so it is less likely to be interrupted.
• Capture the pipes to memory. If you are profiling a console application, piping the output to a file will probably defeat your performance metrics. Instead stick the data into a memory buffer (assuming you are launching the application under test via CreateProcess).

Afterwards

• Use GetProcessTimes, QueryPerformanceCounter, and QueryProcessCycleTime to gather baseline timing metrics.
• You may want to call GetProcessIoCounters or GetProcessMemoryInfo to retrieve additional data.
• Be sure to restore the system changes made in the preparations steps.

Securing Chickens and Eggs

I saw a question get posted to an internal discussion group that went something like this:

I have a console application which uses CredUICmdLinePromptForCredentials. How can I add support to allow a user to pipe a password from a file into my tool? For example:

type password.txt | myTool.exe /user:user1

Answer: You don't.

The Long Answer:

The whole purpose for CredUICmdLinePromptForCredentials, its entire reason for existence, is to provide users a slightly more secure mechanism for supplying private authorization information.

• If a password is stored in clear text on your hard-drive, then it is not secure.
• If a password is sent in clear text via the command shell's pipe/redirection mechanisms, then it is not secure.
• If a password is cached somewhere (clear or obfuscated) that can inherently be used by an un-authorized person (replay attack), then it is not secure.

If you aren't attempting to be secure with a user's password, then there is no reason to use CredUICmdLinePromptForCredentials, just read the file or input stream yourself and be done with it.

Public Service Announcement: If you use one of the CredUI*PromptFor*Credential APIs, be sure to either nuke the password (SecureZeroMemory) or encrypt it (CryptProtectMemory) as soon as possible (i.e. immediately after the call and/or after any verification that needs to happen).

Now, the better question revolves around how one should secure credentials such that they can still be used in an automated process. Unfortunately this quickly degenerates into a philosophical question as computers are inherently insecure, especially if you have physical access to it (debuggers, physical analysis of hardware, etc. can expose your secrets). The issue becomes even more philosophical considering that the objective of the tool hasn't been scoped or discussed (and wasn't in the original post).

For the purpose of this (now philosophical) exercise, we assume that we are not on a single computer - as we are dealing with automation and want to distribute the credentials in a file. If we were on a single computer we might utilize the Credential Manager to help store this information locally.

To secure some chunk of data, we need to encode it. In order to decode the information we need a key. Unfortunately we now need to store the private key in a secure manner. Do we encode the key to secure it? If we fast-forward a bit, you can easily see that this quickly turns into a "which came first, the chicken or the egg" type of problem.

Since computers are insecure, the best place to store private information is not in a computer. The typical place is in a human. Now we've come full circle. In order to secure the file that contains a password, we need someone to remember a password (and people wonder why security is tricky). Now you can see that our philosophical exercise is flawed, so really the question is not "how do we secure the file", but "how secure is good enough?"

Team Cohesion

Every year Microsoft sends out a survey which the execs and managers use to help get the pulse of the worker bees. One of the areas where our group didn't do as well as we would have liked was around inclusion / team cohesion. My manager asked me what I thought we could do in this area, and here are my generalized thoughts.

Common Goal and Purpose

            To start with, there must be an underlying goal which is understood and believed. If the goal is not clear and concise, then there is no coordinated direction. This leads to wasted work (if it isn't truly important to the vision) and marginalizes peoples' contributions or places greater rewards on other team members. Dissatisfaction and discord can also set in if the team doesn't think the goal is reachable or doesn't agree with its direction. The vision is the foundation which your team needs to rally behind and gets everyone marching in the same direction. Changes are needed if people don't believe or understand why their work is important. Often this can be helped by improving communication or cutting unnecessary features and focusing the team on what is important.

Communication

            Good communication is fundamental in ensuring everybody feels included, this means that decisions which impact team members must be understood and believed. Ensure that decisions are not created a vacuum, at the wrong level, or by the wrong people. This is where strong leaders and program managers pay off, they will help drive the features and make sure all the necessary players are informed and brought in on decisions. Additionally, small changes such as office layouts and organization chart optimizations can help foster easier coordination between the individuals who are working on related technologies.

Rewards and Motivation

            Exclusion is a sure way to alienate someone from the team. Recognition, cool projects, gifts, benefits, etc. all need to be appropriately spread around. Militaries across the world have all used unit citations to help build a collective level of pride in a team. It doesn't matter how much an individual contributed (if at all) because, when recognized, everyone in the unit got them. Individual rewards have their time and place but they can weaken the overall team cohesion. Also, make sure that events, entertainment, food options, etc. are all open and inclusive. You definitely don't want a morale event to do more harm than good by alienating the very individuals you most desperately need to improve the morale on.

All of these things can make an impact to how tightly an individual will be integrated within an organization; all it takes is a good leader to help kick some of these into place. But keep in mind that one of the underlying concepts here is empowerment. Do you encourage the employee to make a meaningful difference, or are they just tools to get a job done?

HRESULTS: FACILITY_ONLINE_ID

This is page contains raw error codes. It is meant as a software developer reference, not a customer support site.

Code	HRESULT	Description	#define
1	0x8A020001	Authentication target is invalid or not configured correctly.	ONL_E_INVALID_AUTHENTICATION_TARGET
2	0x8A020002	Your application cannot get the Online Id properties due to the Terms of Use accepted by the user.	ONL_E_ACCESS_DENIED_BY_TOU
3	0x8A020003	Application is incorrectly configured or not yet enabled.	ONL_E_INVALID_APPLICATION

HRESULTS: FACILITY_DEFRAG

This is page contains raw error codes. It is meant as a software developer reference, not a customer support site.

Code	HRESULT	Description	#define
1	0x99000001		E_TOCPARSER_INVALIDASFFILE
2	0x99000002		E_TOCPARSER_INVALIDRIFFFILE

HRESULTS: FACILITY_D2D

This is page contains raw error codes. It is meant as a software developer reference, not a customer support site.

Code	HRESULT	Description	#define
1	0x88990001	The object was not in the correct state to process the method.	D2DERR_WRONG_STATE
2	0x88990002	The object has not yet been initialized.	D2DERR_NOT_INITIALIZED
3	0x88990003	The requested operation is not supported.	D2DERR_UNSUPPORTED_OPERATION
4	0x88990004	The geometry scanner failed to process the data.	D2DERR_SCANNER_FAILED
5	0x88990005	Direct2D could not access the screen.	D2DERR_SCREEN_ACCESS_DENIED
6	0x88990006	A valid display state could not be determined.	D2DERR_DISPLAY_STATE_INVALID
7	0x88990007	The supplied vector is zero.	D2DERR_ZERO_VECTOR
8	0x88990008	An internal error (Direct2D bug) occurred. On checked builds, we would assert. The application should close this instance of Direct2D and should consider restarting its process.	D2DERR_INTERNAL_ERROR
9	0x88990009	The display format Direct2D needs to render is not supported by the hardware device.	D2DERR_DISPLAY_FORMAT_NOT_SUPPORTED
10	0x8899000A	A call to this method is invalid.	D2DERR_INVALID_CALL
11	0x8899000B	No hardware rendering device is available for this operation.	D2DERR_NO_HARDWARE_DEVICE
12	0x8899000C	There has been a presentation error that may be recoverable. The caller needs to recreate, rerender the entire frame, and reattempt present.	D2DERR_RECREATE_TARGET
13	0x8899000D	Shader construction failed because it was too complex.	D2DERR_TOO_MANY_SHADER_ELEMENTS
14	0x8899000E	Shader compilation failed.	D2DERR_SHADER_COMPILE_FAILED
15	0x8899000F	Requested DirectX surface size exceeded maximum texture size.	D2DERR_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE_EXCEEDED
16	0x88990010	The requested Direct2D version is not supported.	D2DERR_UNSUPPORTED_VERSION
17	0x88990011	Invalid number.	D2DERR_BAD_NUMBER
18	0x88990012	Objects used together must be created from the same factory instance.	D2DERR_WRONG_FACTORY
19	0x88990013	A layer resource can only be in use once at any point in time.	D2DERR_LAYER_ALREADY_IN_USE
20	0x88990014	The pop call did not match the corresponding push call.	D2DERR_POP_CALL_DID_NOT_MATCH_PUSH
21	0x88990015	The resource was realized on the wrong render target.	D2DERR_WRONG_RESOURCE_DOMAIN
22	0x88990016	The push and pop calls were unbalanced.	D2DERR_PUSH_POP_UNBALANCED
23	0x88990017	Attempt to copy from a render target while a layer or clip rect is applied.	D2DERR_RENDER_TARGET_HAS_LAYER_OR_CLIPRECT
24	0x88990018	The brush types are incompatible for the call.	D2DERR_INCOMPATIBLE_BRUSH_TYPES
25	0x88990019	An unknown win32 failure occurred.	D2DERR_WIN32_ERROR
26	0x8899001A	The render target is not compatible with GDI.	D2DERR_TARGET_NOT_GDI_COMPATIBLE
27	0x8899001B	A text client drawing effect object is of the wrong type.	D2DERR_TEXT_EFFECT_IS_WRONG_TYPE
28	0x8899001C	The application is holding a reference to the IDWriteTextRenderer interface after the corresponding DrawText or DrawTextLayout call has returned. The IDWriteTextRenderer instance will be invalid.	D2DERR_TEXT_RENDERER_NOT_RELEASED
29	0x8899001D	The requested size is larger than the guaranteed supported texture size at the Direct3D device's current feature level.	D2DERR_EXCEEDS_MAX_BITMAP_SIZE
30	0x8899001E	There was a configuration error in the graph.	D2DERR_INVALID_GRAPH_CONFIGURATION
31	0x8899001F	There was a internal configuration error in the graph.	D2DERR_INVALID_INTERNAL_GRAPH_CONFIGURATION
32	0x88990020	There was a cycle in the graph.	D2DERR_CYCLIC_GRAPH
33	0x88990021	Cannot draw with a bitmap that has the D2D1_BITMAP_OPTIONS_CANNOT_DRAW option.	D2DERR_BITMAP_CANNOT_DRAW
34	0x88990022	The operation cannot complete while there are outstanding references to the target bitmap.	D2DERR_OUTSTANDING_BITMAP_REFERENCES
35	0x88990023	The operation failed because the original target is not currently bound as a target.	D2DERR_ORIGINAL_TARGET_NOT_BOUND
36	0x88990024	Cannot set the image as a target because it is either an effect or is a bitmap that does not have the D2D1_BITMAP_OPTIONS_TARGET flag set.	D2DERR_INVALID_TARGET
37	0x88990025	Cannot draw with a bitmap that is currently bound as the target bitmap.	D2DERR_BITMAP_BOUND_AS_TARGET
38	0x88990026	D3D Device does not have sufficient capabilities to perform the requested action.	D2DERR_INSUFFICIENT_DEVICE_CAPABILITIES
39	0x88990027	The graph could not be rendered with the context's current tiling settings.	D2DERR_INTERMEDIATE_TOO_LARGE
40	0x88990028	The CLSID provided to Unregister did not correspond to a registered effect.	D2DERR_EFFECT_IS_NOT_REGISTERED
41	0x88990029	The specified property does not exist.	D2DERR_INVALID_PROPERTY
42	0x8899002A	The specified sub-property does not exist.	D2DERR_NO_SUBPROPERTIES
43	0x8899002B	AddPage or Close called after print job is already closed.	D2DERR_PRINT_JOB_CLOSED
44	0x8899002C	Error during print control creation. Indicates that none of the package target types (representing printer formats) are supported by Direct2D print control.	D2DERR_PRINT_FORMAT_NOT_SUPPORTED
45	0x8899002D	An effect attempted to use a transform with too many inputs.	D2DERR_TOO_MANY_TRANSFORM_INPUTS