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Updated, 2010-04-20; see above for details.
Note to John: 0.36.0.0 has taken more steps towards compliance with your requirements. Feedback on these moves would be much appreciated.
"The question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating."
I decided to give this a go
Firstly on running the install F-Secure immediately blocked it
Specifically is was the DeepGuard heuristic scanner. I allowed it to go on and install it anyway however but on running it F-Secure blocked it again, presumably because it only allowed the installer previously.
It seems to work pretty well to me although I haven't done much exploring because when I close it I get the Windows Error Reporting dialog that tells me it has crashed. To be specific it happens when I close the settings window and the main window itself. The error log says:
I am using Windows 7 64bit right now, I can test under most things though if you need it.
I rather like the maths problems, but that is possibly because I am currently studying for a maths degree, they do rather vary in the difficulty though. Are they embedded in the exe itself? I couldn't find the images in a quick root about of the folders.
I'll probably leave some more feedback later once I have had time to mull, hope that helps, after all us non-NSIS devs need to stick together
I'm surprised F-Secure picked up the installer, especially since KidSafe uses PAL. (Unless F-Secure managed to "see through" the installer and its compression, find KidSafe.exe, and complain about it? I'm not familiar with F-Secure, so I have no idea if it has the capability)
Did you happen to notice the block message?
I made some changes to recent versions of KidSafe to try and keep antivirus apps happy, but it looks like the biggest change (turning off the keyboard hook until the user tries to block a key combination) may not have worked as well as it should have.
modHooks.MainWndProc is KidSafe's custom message handler; looks like it may not be properly returning control to the default message handler on exit. That could cause the crash you're seeing.
The weird part is that I haven't seen this and nobody else has reported it. I'll definitely look into it, though.
Thanks!
For now, Win 7 would be great; XP is firmly under control, but Vista & 7 are on a totally different level (especially the 64-bit versions).
Yeah, the problems definitely vary in difficulty. Some (mostly the first few) are relatively easy, but some (especially the later ones) have little pit traps (particularly order of operations). I'll probably be simplifying all of the problems in a couple of releases, since John doesn't want to officially release KidSafe until that's done.
Yep, they're embedded in the EXE; nothing keeps troublemakers away like putting the problems in the EXE and then digitally signing the EXE to make sure people don't tamper with the problems.
The embedding process is actually somewhat interesting; I encode the images into text, then put the encoded images (and the problem answers) into an INI file, then embed the INI file into the EXE.
Thanks for the feedback; it helped a great deal! (Especially that bug report - I'll work on tracking that down later today)
btw, with regard to us non-NSIS devs sticking together, check out the Toucan thread.
I'll do some more Toucan tests a bit later.
"The question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating."
think that you are right and F-Secure can read straight through the compression in the installer. As for the block message I cannot remember exactly but it might have been something about trying to access another process? Take that with a grain of salt though
"Trying to access another process" - sounds like F-Secure doesn't like KidSafe's keyboard hook.
Wish there was some way around that AV conflict, because it seems to be the most common problem people are experiencing. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do to directly prevent it; the closest I can do is put in "blanket-coverage" error checking.
btw, I'm working on fixing the crash you got; I think we're a bit closer, but still not quite there.
"The question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating."
think I made a little progress. I ran KidSafe through dependecy walker and this is what it said:
I think the key is the second error, do you specifically load any DLLs in KidSafe?
Yep, several of them. Here's a list.
KidSafe internal DLL's:
* Appearance Pak.dll
* Internet Encodings.dll
* MD5.dll
* PNGUtilitiesPluginV181.dll
* RegEx.dll
System DLL's used by KidSafe:
* kernel32.dll
* shlwapi.dll
* user32.dll
If I had a guess, I'd say the PNGUtilities plugin is the culprit. The system DLL's should all be there, and I believe KidSafe's other internal DLL's are tested on all versions of Windows. PNGUtilities, though, is a 3rd-party component that was discontinued a few years ago; it should still be working, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it stopped.
I'm making some internal changes to KidSafe to get rid of all of its internal DLL dependencies (meaning it'll only rely on the system DLL's); there's no timeline for the next release, though, as the internal changes will be major and I'm still pretty strapped for time.
Thanks for looking into that!
"The question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating."
have some thoughts about the maths problems, I will try and talk to you about them at some point on IRC, they are not quite fully formed yet. I did spot one other thing though, if I disable the Task Manager I can still get to it on Windows 7 by doing Ctrl-Shift-Esc, obviously disabling Ctrl-Esc fixed that though!
Thanks, I'll try to make it into IRC when you're around.
That's unusual. Blocking the Task Manager doesn't actually block any key combinations; it just looks for - and kills - Task Manager, 10 times per second.
* Does the Task Manager have a name other than taskmgr.exe on Win 7?
* Do you have a different task manager (e.g. Process Explorer) set as the default task manager?
* Does the Task Manager run with higher privs than KidSafe?
btw, I might have figured out why you're getting that crash; if I'm right, it's something I should have realized when I fixed a different bug.
Thanks for the feedback!
"The question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating."
name is exactly the same, and I use the normal task manager. As far as I can see it should run at the same privs as KidSafe, I am a little at a loss with this one.
That's weird. I can't think why opening the Task Manager with Ctrl+Alt+Delete would let KidSafe kill it, but not opening the Task Manager with Ctrl+Shift+Escape. Time to do some more research.
Thanks for the info!
"The question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating."
I think I wasn't clear, on Windows 7 Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't open the Task Manager, it shows a screen with options for locking the pc, starting the task manager etc. Admittedly when starting the task manager this way it still runs fine however.
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