He’s Gone
It has been a tough week, and a busy one. I’m getting ready to leave on a vacation, and trying to get all those last-minute things done.
While my last post discussed the genesis of what I call the Configuration Agent and the WDF QA Universal Setup Job, this week’s focus has been entirely on another of my oddball notions- it started as a desire to build a more precise fault injection engine for testing the KMDF loader. With that California background, the project name was easy- Fault? Why, San Andreas, of course!
At a high level it was a programming model built around IAT filtering of calls from a driver into the kernel. I wanted precision, so I could specify behavior by thread and IRQL, program each DDI independently, allow a driver to do its own filtering [i.e. get a callback with context for a DDI call under given conditions]- and with enough flexibility and locking behavior that the behavior could be reprogrammed within such a callback. For instance, in one working application of mine a filter on calls to IoCallDriver from the KMDF runtime were routed on specific threads to a callback in the test driver which then turned off all call logging, as it meant the call was leaving it’s stack location- I was using the logs from calls to various resource allocation DDI to make sure the framework did not allocate resources under conditions in which we contractually would not fail- so I wanted to stop logging before I called IoCallDriver and to restart it after it returned [I knew the driver handling it was synchronous- otherwise I would have to hook the completion side of things, of course].
So the concept went well beyond fault injection, but it’s always been a side-line. My initial tests wound up being very white box, and a refactoring of the loader code meant a similar rewrite of the test was necessary, but there was no time to do that… But with Windows 7 winding up [since we’ve announced dates, that can’t qualify as a secret anymore], I have time to go back and try to at least do a few new things beyond mere maintenance. Such time is rare and fleeting, so I’ve been busily making the most of it.
So today was busy- I worked a bit of overtime on a COM automation server (in process) exposing a scriptable interface to my engine for some of the other team members to use, and got it at least working well enough to demo. Still have my packing to do, and dinner to make and so forth, so home I headed.
Then I turned on the television, and immediately heard the news about Michael Jackson. Whoa…
On those old tapes I’ve been scraping for my archives I’ve got many covers of his material from the time I was playing in bar bands: Billie Jean, Thriller, Beat It- and more. I’ve not posted them because frankly I never thought I did any of them justice- a lot of my material from those days has rough edges [anyone who listens to what I have posted can hear that], but these were just not good enough. But add me to the billions of fans, then and since, sure…
The other thought that came early on was that in my previous post I mentioned having learned to keep some of my more controversial opinions to myself- one of those was intense skepticism about the molestation accusations. I knew I wasn’t likely to sway anyone there- so why bother?
He’s gone, and he was younger than I am- scary stuff. Life is fleeting, and it was an unexpected reminder of that.
But, it’s time to pack my CDs and games and controllers, write those last few checks for bills coming due during the vacation. eat that dinner, and get ready for a night’s rest prior to that final day of work, so another slapdash post, and back to work…
There was some offsetting good news today- besides finding out I really do still remember enough about COM to roll out an in-process automation server on the QT- without using ATL of course, where would the challenge be in that [answer: in learning something new for a change- you old dog!]? But of course it falls into that semi-confidential area where I’ll just have to sit on it for a while [not that it’s likely to shatter the world if revealed anyway, but circumspection is worthy of practice even for an old blowhard like myself].
I’ll try to do something more substantial someday- these days I’ve just not got the time to really write anything too terribly technical. My apologies to those diehards who still try to read this awful stuff I’m churning out of late…
