This weekend, we will be hosting a 2-Day Diablo II Marathon to celebrate the long-awaited Diablo III launch and to show off their completely revamped party system! All Diablo fans can join in celebrating the biggest game launch of the year. The event runs from 00:00 UTC on Saturday, May 12th until 23:59 UTC on Sunday, May 13th. It’s going to be one helluva good time.

Gamers will be racking up as many hours as possible over two hellacious days, playing the bedeviling classic without the frustrating experience typically associated with setting up multiplayer. The revamped party system makes it as easy as 1-2-3!

1)     join matchmaker

2)     accept match

3)     launch game

It’s a better, faster and smarter way to play. Recruit your friends or jump in with new ones for maximum marathon game time on Evolve, which includes instant matchmaking, VPN, chat, VoIP, and game launching. More game, less lame.

Plus, claiming bragging rights has never been easier with detailed playtime tracking, and direct screenshot and video sharing to Evolve, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

See you in hell and register online!

Today, Echobit, LLC (http://www.echobit.com) announces the release of its next generation social network and toolset for gamers, called Evolve (http://www.evolvehq.com). After an exciting 8 months in closed beta (and adding 8,000 members along the way), the three-person startup has quietly built a platform that maximizes the reach and influence of gamers’ and the games they play within the rapidly expanding, increasingly disconnected video game universe.

FRAGMENTATION = FAIL
The video game industry is multiplatformed and wildly incongruent. PCs and consoles have been joined by mobile devices, social networks and tablets to amass a global audience of over 1.2 billion gamers—up from 250 million just a few years ago—an audience with extremely limited ability to consolidate their various exploits into one discrete gaming context. “Today’s gamers want to remain whole and in control of their gaming lives across any game, publisher or platform,” states Adam Sellke, Co-founder and CEO of Echobit. “Publishers and hardware manufacturers like Activision/Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft, Valve, Zynga, Apple, Microsoft, Sony and others are all protecting their respective turfs on Battle.net, Call of Duty Elite, Origin, uPlay, Steam, GameCenter, Xbox Live, Play Station Network and the like. That’s nuts. These silos and walled gardens unnecessarily constrain gamers’ freedom, so we created Evolve.”

L’EGGO YOUR EGO
Evolve provides gamers an elegant view of their gaming world from a single profile. From it, players are treated to stats, rankings and charts of the games they and their friends are enjoying. Evolve not only gives players a place to roost, but also plenty of ways to crow. “A big part of gaming is bragging,” contends Sellke. “Evolve lets you really show ‘em who’s boss.” The platform supports the ability to import and aggregate various gaming achievements onto a profile. Also, Evolve members are equipped with “live” badges for touting their prowess with up-to-the-minute data on sites and forums. Evolve has recently added in-game screen and video capture to help gamers “prove once and for all that their kung fu is the best,” says Sellke.

QUIT PLAYING WITH YOURSELF
There are a lot of social tools and game tracking/achievement aggregators out there, but no other platform directly facilitates game coordination and connectivity like Evolve. “Everything we do is aimed at maximizing the gaming experience for gamers,” says Sellke. “A big part of that is bringing gamers together and reducing the time it takes to actually get playing.” Multi-protocol IM, group chat and in-party VoIP allow gamers to connect, gab and kvetch to each other, virtually anywhere, in real-time. Friendships can be inherited from Facebook. Others are able to be recruited via invitation links that bring players together as friends or into groups and parties. Joining a party establishes a VPN connection in one-click for LAN play and built-in VoIP. One other feature, an industry first, is the party finder—a universal matchmaking system that allows gamers to poll the network for multiple games of interest at the same time. As soon as the system finds others who share the same pursuits, all those concerned are offered a match and, upon acceptance, are instantly placed into a party.

SUMMARY
Fragmentation and platform proliferation threaten gamers’ ability to maintain a singular reference point to their gaming activities and limits their social value. Evolve, through its game-agnostic connectivity tools and common player profile is establishing a free, open and universal platform in this space, spanning the void and making it the inevitable solution.

The best days for PC gaming lie ahead. Despite more than a decade of strong growth in console sales and a myriad of emerging threats ranging from smartphones to tablets the rumors of PC gaming’s impending demise have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, an NPD Group report from last year concluded that “the PC is still the most-used system for online gaming, with 85 percent of online gamers reporting using a PC for online gaming activities.” And industry heavyweights seem to agree. Frank Gibeau, president of EA Games, indicated EA’s support for the PC in March of this year, saying “from our perspective, [the PC is] an extremely healthy platform… It’s totally conceivable it will become our biggest platform.”

PC GAMING MUST CHANGE

So PC gaming is doing just fine. End of story, right? Wrong. Dead wrong.

PC gaming has a big problem. It’s not the hardware. It’s not piracy. It’s not the games. It’s how PC gamers are forced to play. The environment is far too fragmented and siloed. As a result, the PC gaming experience is isolated, dissociative, and falls short for a generation of gamers raised on Facebook and Twitter. These social barriers are the biggest obstacle to the survival of the PC as a gaming platform.

Evolve intends to break these barriers down with a website and desktop app meant to help PC gamers connect, coordinate, and play. Still in closed beta, Evolve has grown to 3,000 members in 60 countries. Collectively, they’ve tracked over three million minutes of game time and have banded together in more than 1,500 groups and parties.

A NEW SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

As a website, Evolve functions as a traditional social network with features that include walls, status updates, a news feed, and integration with Facebook and Twitter. Gamers can express their opinions using the standard ‘like’ button—or, if they’re just not feeling the love, ‘meh’ and ‘hate’ buttons. The site is rounded out by comprehensive stats display, a games library, forums, and a groups system that allows players to build communities around their favorite games.

As a desktop app, Evolve makes its platform available where gamers spend most of their time: in-game. A website just isn’t enough. Gamers need a platform that isn’t limited to their browser. And the desktop app does just that, by offering up the full Evolve web experience through its high-performance in-game overlay. Beyond the features available on the website, the app provides additional tools including a gamer-oriented web browser, multi-protocol chat client, and playtime tracking. Rounding out the app is its party system. One part chat room, one part VPN client, the party system gives gamers a way to bypass clunky server browsers and quickly jump in game with their friends.

Although the desktop app is currently only available for Windows Vista and 7 with support for 400 games, the Evolve team plans on making it available for other systems and extending support to encompass virtually all PC games.

Expanded system and game support isn’t the biggest thing that’s in store for the platform, either. We’re currently hard at work on our killer feature: universal matchmaking. Multiplayer gaming has continued to explode, but gamers are still stuck finding matches one game at a time and only while that game is actively running. The prospect for quickly finding a pick up match across all these games has been nearly impossible. Until now.

Evolve’s plans may be bold, but we’re ready for the fight. If PC gaming is to thrive, it needs an open platform with a new direction. It needs Evolve.

What I do want to share, however, is that our Q3 launch of our Alpha did, in fact, take place and that our efforts to attract interest from Angels  (besides our “friends,  family, and advisor” round) has taken us to Silicon Valley.

We’ll post on more recent developments separately.

The creativity and hard work that has gone into our journey during this time has been inspiring and fruitful.

Three things stand out as our biggest endeavors over the last few months:

• Advisors
• Alpha
• (The search for) Angels

So on the first topic of advisors, it is my pleasure to announce that we’ve recently completed the assembly of an international board of advisors consisting of top-tier consumer tech and game industry experts and luminaries.

They are:

• Wim Stocks – Former President/COO, Elephant Entertainment; Executive VP, Atari; Executive VP, GT Interactive
• Robert Stephens – Founder, The Geek Squad; and recently named CTO, Best Buy
• Maxime Julien – Former COO, Electronic Arts; VP Operations, Ubisoft
• Jim Rossignol – Author, This Gaming Life; founding blogger, Rock, Paper, Shotgun; writer for PC Gamer, Wired, and Edge
• [Name Not Currently Publicly Available] – Award-winning game company Co-Founder/Creative Director

On behalf of Echobit, I’d like to welcome Wim, Robert, Maxime, Jim, and You-Know-Who-You-Are to the team. Your experience and talents will bring many valuable perspectives on the gaming landscape in the weeks and months and years ahead. We are thrilled to have you working with us to make Evolve the best online gaming platform in the world.

Update 9/27:  due to other obligations, Maxime is no longer able to support us as an advisor. We thank him for his willingness to help us on our journey thus far, and wish him well in his exciting new endeavors. Bonne chance, Maxime!

Then yesterday, something changed. While I was out in the Spring sunshine on a 10-mile run, it happened:  I found myself  ”in the zone”.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, running started to feel good. No longer was I even thinking about it. No longer was I trying to convince my body to keep moving. It was easier. And not only was it easier, I was going faster.

So too, has been our experience at Echobit. The last few months have been challenging. And even though it hasn’t always felt like it, we’ve been quietly and steadily making important progress…

Since the beginning of this year:

• We’ve closed a small seed round of capital
• We’ve successfully applied for and been granted an H1B visa for our Co-Founder, Soren Dreijer
• Our engineering team has come onboard full-time
• We’ve updated our company and product websites; and
• We’ve put out three compelling releases of our VPN platform, LAN Bridger (in less than a month)

But perhaps what’s most exciting for us is how Echobit has found itself in a zone of its own. Our vision has never been clearer. Our updated plan is presenting us with an even more exciting path. And finally, our work on Evolve is starting to get easier—and gain momentum.

Q2 promises to be very satisfying, as we get into better and better shape. Goals over the next three months include more fundraising, another release of LAN Bridger, providing a public peek at Evolve, plus a whole lot more behind the scenes.

So here’s to a great Spring. And thanks for joining us on our journey.

If you’re like me, you still want to be able to run debug builds on your test machines. As always, you need the Debug CRT for that, which I’m sure you know isn’t part of the redistributable package. Microsoft has documented two ways of installing a debug CRT on test machines:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa985618%28VS.80%29.aspx

I personally use the second approach since I know exactly which files get copied to the target machine and it’s just less intrusive in general.

When you apply the security patch on your dev machine, the various libraries that you link against should’ve been updated as well. (You can always check the final manifest file in your build folder to see which version of the CRT you’re building against.) I usually just grab the latest debug DLLs from the Visual Studio folder at:

<Path to VS folder>\VC\redist\Debug_NonRedist\x86\Microsoft.VC90.DebugCRT
<Path to VS folder>\VC\redist\Debug_NonRedist\x64\Microsoft.VC90.DebugCRT

Just copy the DLLs and the accompanying .manifest file to the target folder.

You might have noticed that the security update has overwritten the existing DLLs in those folders. This means that if you want to debug an older build of your product, you’ll have to manually pull out the DLLs and the corresponding .manifest file from the WinSxs folder. That’s not terribly hard to do (albeit annoying), and I’ll describe that in a future blog post.

We entered the MN Cup 2009 earlier this year. It’s a competition for startup companies and their breakthrough ideas. The semifinalists were announced last week and we made it into the next round. We’re extremely excited to be one of the 49 companies that were selected from over a 1000 submissions.

More information to follow as we progress through the competition.

I always listen to music when working. At work, that’s not a problem since I’ve got all my music stored on my work computer. However, when on the road all my music is stored on my laptop. This becomes a problem since my laptop’s music player cannot be accessed without first minimizing the fullscreen remote desktop window.

Actually, there are two problems here:

1. There is no keyboard shortcut for minimizing a fullscreen remote desktop session. You have to use the mouse cursor and click on the minimize button on the “banner” at the top.
2. The media keys (play, pause, stop, etc.) that are present on so many laptops today are forwarded to the remote computer rather than to the music player on the local computer.

These problems become a real nuisance after a while when working primarily in a fullscreen remote desktop window, and so I decided to investigate if these problems could be addressed.

Terminal Services allow you to register add-ons that are loaded by mstsc.exe when you connect to a remote desktop server. Through a mechanism called virtual channels, the server- and client-side of the remote desktop connection can communicate with each other.

This mechanism is perfect for addressing the problems I identified above. For instance, when a hotkey is pressed in a fullscreen remote desktop session, the server requests that the client minimizes the remote desktop window, and when a media key is pressed it’s forwarded to the client, which injects the key press on the client computer such that it’s routed to e.g. the local music player without requiring the user to minimize the remote desktop window.

The add-on consists of three components described below. The client- and server-side components must be explicitly registered with Terminal Services at the client and server computers, respectively. You must be running with Administrator privileges when registering them.

Server-side component:

This component is responsible for intercepting the user input and forwarding it to the client computer. It does so by registering several hotkeys.

To register this component with Terminal Services, run the following command from Start->Run:

<path to component>\RdpServerControl.exe install

To unregister this component with Terminal Services, run the following command from Start->Run:

<path to component>\RdpServerControl.exe uninstall

The server-side component must be launched every time a new remote desktop session is initiated. You can do this manually by simply running the executable when you’ve connected to the server, or by having it start automatically when a user logs on. The component exits automatically when the user disconnects from the Terminal Services session.

Client-side component:

This component is responsible for executing the commands requested by the server-side component.

To register this component with Terminal Services, run the following command from Start->Run:

regsvr32 <path to component>\RdpClientControl.dll

To unregister this component with Terminal Services, run the following command from Start->Run:

regsvr32 /u <path to component>\RdpClientControl.dll

Configuration component:

This is just a small tool for configuring the server-side component. For instance, you can specify the keyboard shortcut for minimizing the fullscreen remote desktop window. It’s not required for using the add-on, which uses the default settings described below.

This component must be run on the server.

The default configuration is as follows:

• Alt+F1: Minimize fullscreen remote desktop window.
• Media keys are being forwarded by default.

Download

If you’d like to try out the add-on for yourself, you can get it here: x86 or x64. It requires the Visual C++ 2008 SP1 redistributable: x86 or x64.

Disclaimer:

Please note that it’s a very simple tool that was created for a very specific purpose, and the feature set is thereafter. If you experience any problems, drop me a line and I’d be more than happy to help you get it to work.

What cracks me up about this is that when she gets back to her own workstation, it’s not even locked! If you’re worried that people might be snooping around and you know for a fact that your account has unrestricted network access, why the hell do you leave your computer unlocked when you go somewhere.

Just a random note

Shortly after I had created my account, it turned out that I’d given them an incorrect mailing address because the agent at my apartment’s leasing office had accidentally written the wrong street number on the leasing papers (well done…). Even though only the last digit was wrong, and the street number one I’d been given didn’t even exist, it meant I had to get in touch with my bank, insurance company, etc., to make sure they all had my correct address.

Unfortunately, changing the mailing address with my bank turned out to be more difficult than expected.

They have a really nice home banking portal and one of the things they allow you to do is update your current address. So, I went ahead and filled out the form and it told me that I should allow 24 hours for the changes to take effect. Upon receiving an e-mail notification from the bank shortly after stating that I’d made changes to my account, I believed my address had been changed successfully (or at least was about to), and I happily forgot about the issue.

Later that same month, I received my monthly statement from the bank in the mail. The address on the letter hadn’t been corrected and was still pointing to my non-existing address, however. (I guess USPS is clever enough to figure out where I live because it’s such a slight error.) I tried calling the bank about the issue, but every time the automatic phone system attempted to forward me to a customer representative the call was dropped.

Being lazy, I refused to give in and go to the local bank office to get the issue fixed, so instead I looked around the home banking site some more. I was pleased to discover that it had a nice “Chat with a customer representative now” feature. Upon activating the feature, a chat window appeared and shortly after a representative connected to the session and asked me in the usual overly polite way what he might assist me with.

I explained the situation, which he was very happy to assist me with. He just needed to verify my identity before he went ahead and updated my mailing address. Fair enough. I patiently answered all of his questions about the number of accounts I had, where I lived (by providing him with my incorrect address), and so on. Eventually he went ahead and updated the address and told me that the change could take up to 24 hours to take effect.

I was happy. I’d found the online chat feature quite convenient as it had saved me a trip to the bank. Even better, though, this time the change had to be effective since it’d been done by a human.

Wrong!

A couple of weeks later I noticed by coincidence that the address listed on my home banking portal was still pointing to the incorrect one. Despite numerous appeals from my friends to just go to the bank to get it over with, I decided to give the customer representative chat feature a last chance.

This time around I made sure to let the representative know that his colleague had failed to do this correctly last time around and that I was running low on patience. He assured me that he would make the change successfully. I just had to answer a few security questions first.

It occurred to me that if I had successfully logged in to my home banking account through the multiple layers of security offered by the bank, why did I have to go through yet another process of verifying my identity by answering a bunch of security questions? A friend of mine suggested that maybe the customer representative didn’t have any information about me when I connected to the chat session. I doubted that, so I asked him:

You: I have a question too. When I joined the chat, does it say who I am or are you relying on whatever I tell you?

Nicholas: Yes, Soren. We have all the account information with us.

You: so why do you have to ask me all these questions? I mean, I’m logged into home banking so you already know who I am since I logged in

Nicholas: I understand that these questions are annoying; however, these are for the security of your accounts.

Nicholas: As your account security is of prime importance to us.

You: I know, I’m just failing to see what extra security it gives since I wouldn’t be chatting with you if I hadn’t already proven my identity when logging into home banking

Nicholas: I completely understand your concern in this matter.

Interesting. Apparently, the bank believes that if they verify my identity multiple times, their online site will be more secure. Honestly, I think this is most likely an issue with the computer system that the bank uses internally, which doesn’t distinguish between assisting customers phoning in or using an online feature. Either way, it just makes the whole customer experience worse since it means we’ll have to go through multiple hoops to do one thing. It also means customer representatives will have to spend more time assisting people.

Added bonus

As an added bonus, I’ve included the customer representative’s last few sentences before I left the chat. I think it really illustrates how overly polite these guys are (or are required to be). To me, it just seems superficial and unnecessary since I know he doesn’t mean it and it just sounds plain stupid:

Nicholas: I reassure you that your concern is very important to us, and will be resolved with utmost priority.

Nicholas: You are most welcome.

Nicholas: Thank you very much for giving us an opportunity to assist you.

Nicholas: It was a pleasure assisting an esteemed customer like you today.

This is a pretty simple and straightforward scheme that works quite well. With this post, however, I wanted to highlight how commonly used this approach has become that the stores (and their employees) seem to have forgotten why it was created in the first place.

My brother and I happened to end up in a store that used this exact approach. After having picked out the clothes we wanted to try on, we went to the fitting room area where we were met by a huge line of people waiting for their turn. When we finally got to the front of the line, it turned out that there were actually plenty of fitting rooms available but there was only one sales assistant around who could hand out badges. Everybody therefore had to wait for him to go through the line, one by one, and showing each customer to an available fitting room.

Unfortunately, he was so busy counting the number of items for the people entering the fitting rooms that he barely had time to look at the people coming out and instead they just dumped the badges on the nearest table and left. The sales assistant didn’t seem to care at all.

When my brother and I came out of the fitting room, the sales assistant was nowhere to be found. Other people came out too and looked similarly confused. Just like the people before us, we simply dumped our badges and the clothes we didn’t want to buy and left.

What annoyed me the most was that we’d spent more than 10 minutes in line for no reason at all. There was absolutely no point whatsoever in having the sales assistant hand out badges since he never checked them when people came back out.

In my opinion, this is what happens when security gets in the way of things. It’s understandable that the store wants to avoid shoplifting, but if they don’t follow through on their security measures then it just becomes a customer annoyance.

I hate wasting my time…

Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed, but as a security-conscious IT professional I immediately saw that the registration page wasn’t encrypted with SSL. This, in my opinion, is particularly bad practice for a government-controlled website that expects its users to enter confidential information — and we’re not “just” talking credit card information here.

Since I had to complete the form, I reluctantly filled out the remaining fields and hit Submit. I was redirected to a confirmation page, which told me that a confirmation e-mail had be been sent to me to verify the e-mail address I had entered.

Fair enough. That’s standard practice these days.

A couple of minutes later the confirmation e-mail arrived. I was horrified to learn, however, that all the information I had entered on the registration page had been reprinted in the e-mail — even my passport information.

That did it. I immediately fired off an e-mail to the Consulate trying to voice my concerns about the security of the site. I was fortunate enough to have a contact at the Consulate from a previous correspondence, and when I told her about my experiences she was kind enough to forward my e-mail to the person responsible.

I received a response within an hour (what a pleasant surprise) and it turns out the site was supposed to be SSL encrypted, but for some reason the main page was linking to the wrong version of the page. This just illustrates how easily things can go wrong, even if it was done with the best intentions.

The confirmation e-mail was deliberate, though, and the government official assured me that they’d address the (obvious) security issue in an upcoming large-scale redesign of the site in January.

I’m very pleased that the Consulate responded so quickly to my concerns. I think it happens way too often that sites remain broken and unsafe for long periods of time even though the security holes are known to the maintainers.

Kudos to the Consulate!

When a 16-bit application is launched on 32-bit Windows, NTVDM is used as a proxy application in order to launch the original application. NTVDM provides a complete virtual 8086 mode environment for the 16-bit application to run in. (In fact, all the proxied applications share a dedicated thread in NTVDM.) Since these applications are hosted internally by NTVDM, they only show up in Task Manager if the user has enabled the “Options->Show 16-bit tasks” menu option.

As can be seen in the screenshot below, two 16-bit applications (wowexec.exe and rdo001gl.exe) are hosted by ntvdm.exe on my computer. Wowexec.exe works together with ntvdm.exe to provide a 16-bit environment.

If you use Process Explorer from Sysinternals, these 16-bit processes won’t show up in the process list because they’re not considered “real” processes on a 32-bit operating system. Personally, though, I find it quite useful that I can view all the processes running on my system whether they’re 16-bit or 32-bit. It’s sort of weird if an application’s window is present in the taskbar but a corresponding process cannot be found in the process list.

So, how does Task Manager go about showing these 16-bit processes? It uses something called the Virtual DOS Manager Debug library (VDMDBG) (part of the Windows SDK), which lets you access 16-bit process information on a 32-bit operating system. For instance, VDMDBG lets you enumerate all VDMs currently running 16-bit processes (or tasks, as they’re referred to internally), or all the tasks running in a particular VDM.

Two functions are central in updating the process list view in taskmgr.exe: CProcPage::UpdateProcInfoArray and CProcPage::UpdateProcListview. The first function obtains a listing of all the processes currently running on the system by calling ntdll!ZwQuerySystemInformation and steps through each one and adds it to an internal array. The function also extracts various information about the process (image name, CPU time, etc.) and calls CProcInfo::SetData to set it internally. CProcPage::UpdateProcListview, on the other hand, is responsible for updating the GUI by tapping into the aforementioned internal process info array.

The CProcInfo::SetData function is particularly interesting because it checks to see if the current process is ntvdm.exe:

push    offset aNtvdm_exe ; "ntvdm.exe"
push    eax             ; wchar_t *
call    ds:__imp___wcsicmp
test    eax, eax
pop     ecx
pop     ecx
jnz     loc_100CA37

If it is, CProcInfo::SetData calls VDMDBG!VDMEnumTaskWOWEx to obtain information about the 16-bit processes currently being hosted by ntvdm.exe. The second parameter to the function is a pointer to a callback function, which is set to CProcPage::WowTaskCallback.

In the screenshot above of Task Manager, ntvdm.exe hosted two 16-bit applications, wowexec.exe and rdo001gl.exe. On my computer, we therefore expect CProcPage::WowTaskCallback to be called twice, once for each task. To verify, we can set a breakpoint in the function and take a look at the fourth and fifth parameters passed to it:

0:000> da poi(ebp+14)
001ae6f8  "RDO001GL"
0:000> da poi(ebp+18)
001ae701  "C:\PROGRA~1\BC31\BOOK\RDO001GL.E"
001ae721  "XE"

CProcPage::WowTaskCallback calls CProcPage::SetDataWowTask to obtain information about the process, and to add it to the internal process info array alongside the 32-bit processes. However, to disinguish the two types of processes (16-bit and 32-bit), Task Manager displays the 16-bit processes as sub-processes of the ntvdm.exe process by indenting them in the process list.

That’s all there is to it.

It had my name on it and it was even spelled with the Danish o-with-a-slash (ø) character (see picture below).

My first thought was that Microsoft certainly went all out to impress their conference attendees by individually customizing each bag, but it quickly turned out that both Ken and Steve had the same name on their bags. Little did I know that it was merely a coincidence (rather than a gesture) that the company, which made the bags, was simply named similarly to me.

It still made my day, though. What are the odds…