Researching Windows 10's "Who owns this PC?" Question

In the month that has passed since I asked my question on Super User about what the "Who owns this PC?" question in the Windows 10 setup actually means, some other people asked the same question on Microsoft forums, Some answers have been posted on those forums (none on my question yet), indicating that it has to do with Azure Active Directory, Microsoft's organization cloud service. Choosing that the organization owns it results in the question of whether a normal domain or an Azure AD environment is in place. Nobody is really sure why it's allegedly difficult to change, though.

Further reading: a question on TechNet, a question on Microsoft Answers

Weirdness with Windows Update and Windows 10 Upgrade

While messing around with Windows Update (on my Windows 8.1 Pro machine) today, I noticed some strange behavior with the Windows 10 upgrade mechanism that got installed a few months ago along with the Get Windows 10 app.

Whenever I manually select some updates to install (not including the Win10 upgrade of course), the progress indicator retains the "Downloading Windows 10" caption/style. Once the updates finish, the Windows 10 upgrade files start downloading again, despite them having already been downloaded and my having canceled my reservation. Fortunately, a press of the "Stop download" button saves the day, or at least the network utilization.

I have tried hiding the Windows 10 upgrade entry in the available updates list by right-clicking it and choosing "Hide update" as I would do with any other update, but it does not seem to have an effect. The checkbox next to it grays out, but next time I open the dialog, even after a reboot, the entry is back.

Hopefully I won't accidentally upgrade to Windows 10 before I'm ready.

Canceling Windows 10 Upgrade

Personally, I would like to wait a little while longer before upgrading to Windows 10. There are still some issues, mostly performance problems, that I would like worked out before I update. Some poking around revealed that the Get Windows 10 program that was installed via Windows Update shortly before Windows 10 was released has an option to cancel the reservation in the "Check your upgrade status" section. Click that button, confirm the decision, and the program reports the reservation as no longer in existence.

There appears to be some strange behavior with Windows Update after canceling a reservation; it still seems to think I want to download/install Windows 10. The Windows 10 preinstall files are still on the disk, in $Windows.~BT and $Windows.~WS in the root of the system drive. Hopefully nothing unexpected will come of that.

ImfPreview Bug: Re-registered Event Handler

For quite a while, I have been occasionally experiencing a strange issue with ImfPreview: right-clicking songs in Music Mappings (to play them) sometimes results in the player dialog reopening once or a few times after it is closed. Only recently did I pinpoint the problem.

When the Music Mappings dialog is opened, ImfPreview hooks the songs list's MouseClick event and adds a handler that converts the IMF and plays it. The problem is that the handler is added every time the dialog is opened, so the dialog appears once for every time the user has opened Music Mappings after starting Abiathar.

The fix will be to check whether the dialog-opening code has already run and skip the AddHandler if it has.

Protecting Abiathar VeriMaps Certificates in a Synchronized Environment

Since v2.2, Abiathar has included a feature called VeriMaps with which users can cryptographically sign their levels. The signing certificate for each user should be kept private, because it is used to identify that user to those who might wish to check the authenticity and integrity of downloaded levels. That presents a bit of a problem to those working in shared, synchronized folders (like Dropbox). Fortunately, Abiathar has ways to deal with that.

By default, Abiathar looks for a file called VeriMaps.asign as the signing certificate. However, that can be changed with the VeriMapsCertPath option in editor.aconf. The configuration file must reside in the same directory as Abiathar to be recognized. The value of that option can be a relative or absolute path, so it can be pointed to a file outside of the shared folder. The best choice would probably be to have enough upward traversals to store the certificate immediately outside of the shared folder. If the file does not exist, Abiathar understands that the user does not have a VeriMaps certificate available.

For major projects that truly involve multiple people (rather than one getting assistance from another), I would be happy to issue a signing certificate named for the project. That way, there is no risk of key leakage.

ActiveNav - Forgot Everything

I downloaded ActiveNav onto my reissued school laptop today (because it's a nice tool that I like to have around), and realized that despite having written it, I cannot remember how to use it. The help command was helpful for the basics (bind, ce, and meta), but it's almost completely useless for more complicated things like find. Fortunately, I have the source code to remind me what subcommands do interesting things.

I suppose I should, when I have time, put a little effort into improving the in-program documentation, since having to reference an external manual would be inconvenient. Another reasonable area of exploration is writing to the Active Directory; currently it only supports reading operations.

FMod - Tileset Improvements

A while ago, I received two Abiathar requests from a member of the community. Today I got around to implementing them.

First, he suggested keeping track of the scrolling position for each tileset. Previously, the Y offset was reset whenever the user moved to a different tileset; that is, there was only one variable to store the scrolling position. Implementing the request required a small reworking of one of the oldest parts of Abiathar, but it wasn't too difficult, and was definitely a good thing.

The other request was for a mode in which selecting a different tile causes the tile palette to automatically scroll, making sure the selected tile is always visible. I thought that would be best implemented as a configuration option, so that's how it is. When SnapToSelTiles is enabled in editor.aconf, it is ensured that newly selected tiles are always visible in the palette. This option is most useful with Simultaneous Tileset, but it also works well in the other mode.

Before I release a new version, I want to make some improvements to sound management, especially the handling of the two different "formats" of sound chunks.