Software Diagnostics Library

A book can serve the role of CV but this weekend another idea got into my mind is to publish my old pre-Citrix times CV (1987 - 2003) as a book and as an example of a guy with CV-writing obsession like I had 5 - 8 years ago:

• Title: Resume and CV: As a Book
• Paperback: 16 pages
• Publisher: Opentask (01 Dec 2008)
• ISBN-13: 978-1-906717-34-6

Soon it should appear on Amazon and bookshops around the world. Now when someone asks me to send a CV I can send them a link to buy it.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

OpenTask, a publisher of my books, is about to release a notebook for bloggers. For details please visit the page:

Idea: Blogger’s Notebook

I found it indispensable to keep track of my own blog post ideas in a hardcopy format, work on several blog transformations into books and simultaneously keep track of work and home-related tasks.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

OpenTask, a publisher of my books, is about to release a notebook for small and self-publishers. It’s title is Title itself. For details please visit the page:

Title: Book Publisher’s Notebook

I found it indispensable to keep track of my own book titles and their book data in a hardcopy format.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

A number of writers expressed their wishes to be a co-author of the forthcoming SF novel Googol Dump. I have selected Dun Bugmons for his name sounding like Dún Laoghaire where I live nearby by walking distance in Monkstown and his surname accidentally reminding me of Bug Monitors. Please join me in congratulating Dun Bugmons!

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

While working on WinDbg command cards and even before that when compiling a comparison table for both WinDbg and GDB I came to an idea of abstract debugging commands that correspond to common debugging tasks, have clear syntax and semantics and serve metaphorically as a basis for conversion of analog thinking to digital debugger assistance (see analog-to-digital conversion for ADC abbreviation). Here a WinDbg extension can help but now I think about using a tree-based approach similar to CMDTREE.TXT for CDA Checklist. More on this later. Any comments or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

When we have tool commands that sound similar to English words like common root French or German vocabulary to English why not to leverage time-proven foreign language learning techniques:

WinDbg: A Reference Poster and Learning Cards

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

Suddenly the course of my publishing activities bended a little to produce a DIY poster and learning cards to be published soon. Here are the product details:

Annotation:
WinDbg is a powerful debugger from Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows. It has more than 350 commands that can be used in different debugging scenarios. The cover of this book is a poster featuring crash dump analysis checklist and common patterns seen in memory dumps and live debugging sessions. Inside the book you can find ready to cut learning cards with commands and their descriptions coloured according to their use for crash dump or live debugging sessions and user, kernel or complete memory dumps. Tossing cards can create unexpected connections between commands and help to learn them more quickly. Uncut pages can also serve as birds eye view to WinDbg debugging capabilities. More than 350 WinDbg commands including meta-commands and extensions are included.

• Title: WinDbg: A Reference Poster and Learning Cards
• Authors: Dmitry Vostokov
• Publisher: Opentask (20 November 2008)
• Language: English
• Product Dimensions: 28.0 x 21.6
• ISBN-13: 978-1-906717-29-2
• Paperback: 20 pages

Book Excerpt

Front cover:

Back cover:

After you take inside pages out you are left with a cover that you can use as a crash dump analysis checklist and patterns poster:

I also plan to update this book on a yearly basis. 

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

CtxHideEx32 tool has been updated to the version 1.1 and can be downloaded from Citrix support. It now allows a substring search for a window title or class, for example:

CtxHideEx32.exe HIDE "*error" "" OK

As by-product coupled with an optional command line I discovered that it allows to automatically dump any process displaying a message box with an error message in its window title. Here is an example using TestDefaultDebugger64 to simulate an application fault message where the following instance of CtxHideEx32 was setup to dump a process showing WER dialog on Vista:

CtxHideEx32.exe NONE "*Microsoft Windows" "" "C:\kktools\userdump8.1\x64\userdump.exe %d"

We click on a big lightning button:

and then WER dialog appears:

Immediately CtxHideEx32 kicks in and starts dumping the owner process incessantly so you better to dismiss this dialog by choosing something:

We see it was WerFault.exe. 

Note: I think I have to amend CtxHideEx32 to make it wait until the spawned command line interpreter finishes its job. Stay tuned.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

Science fiction books are among my favourite. I used to read lots of them (in Russian) during my school and university years. Also I started reading science fiction in English 8 years ago upon my arrival to Ireland and one of Asimov’s books about Foundation was my first English fiction book fully read from cover to cover. Now I want to write something fictional related to memory dump analysis and the notion of 3-dimensional memory dumps is a fascinating idea to exploit:

Googol Dump - a 3D memory dump where the 3rd dimension is a time arrow of computational 2D memory snapshots.

Note: one googol is 10¹⁰⁰ and this number of bits is sufficient enough to record the full history of memory snapshots for 64-bit, 128-bit, 256-bit and even 1024-bit computers running thousands of years.

The novel is planned to be published next year (ISBN: 978-1906717322) and is written from the perspective of a debugger.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

Matthieu Suiche has released the new version of win32dd tool with the ability to save physical memory in a WinDbg-compliant memory dump file including pages that normally are not saved in a complete memory dump.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

Monthly summary of my Management Bits and Tips blog:

• Rhetorical Question Disorder
• Management Bit and Tip 0×1000
• Fine Collection of Management Antipatterns

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

Previously announced book Crash Dump Analysis for System Administrators and Support Engineers (Windows Edition) has got its draft cover featuring WinDbg  output from a kernel memory dump forced by Citrix SystemDump tool.

Front:

Back:

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

Monthly summary of my Literate Scientist blog:

• Mathematics: Form and Function
• The Princeton Companion to Mathematics
• Essays on Life Itself
• Structural Stability And Morphogenesis
• Semiotics: The Basics

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

The perfect binary Christmas gift for your family and friends is soon available on Amazon, B&N and in local bookshops around the world! In the mean time you can view the product information and even order it:

Baby Turing

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

It is not about me. It is the reciprocal counterpart to Five golden rules of troubleshooting. Whereas the former are for artefact submitters, internal and external customers of memory dump analysts and complex trace readers, I‘m RARE are rules for writing analysis reports with easy to remember mnemonic:

I‘m RARE  - Iridium Rules of Analysis Report Excellence

Note about Iridium metal from Wikipedia: “It is one of the rarest elements in the Earth’s crust, with annual production and consumption of only three tonnes.” 

Here is the draft number 5 of them (subject to change in the forthcoming weeks):

1. Use a template.

2. Structure a report according to audience technical level and organizational processes.

3. Use checklists not only for commands and tools but also for things to avoid in reports and things to encourage.

4. Put all relevant data for later search and for other engineers to reproduce the analysis.

5. Provide appropriate explanations and narrative in the cases where analysis is inconclusive.

This also needs to be integrated with PARTS methodology. 

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

I continued thinking about bugteria in memory dumps all the day yesterday and came to the conclusion that the study of crash dump analysis patterns needs its own name and the obvious choice was Bugteriology:

Bugteriology is the study of crash dump analysis patterns (bugteria). Its main subject is identification, classification and characterization of such patterns found in memory dumps (bugterial species).

I initially registered a domain for this purpose (later abandoned) pointing to crash dump analysis and debugging portal but I want to think through this idea and perhaps make it a subdomain of dumpanalysis.org with a page for easy online pattern classification and make it also an online supplement to forthcoming encyclopedia of crash dump analysis patterns.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

Yesterday was one of those days when I was in a good mood thinking about bugs. Suddenly a thought stroke me about the similar sounding words bacterium and bugterium (perhaps because I’m currently reading a theoretical biology book, Essays on Life Itself). I admit that it might be sounding the same only for a non-native English ear though. So the new definition was born:

Bugterium (pl. bugteria) - an instance of a memory dump analysis pattern found in a crash (memory, core) dump file.

Why a bugterium and not a cdarium? The motivation (with a hindsight) lies in the complexity of debugging (and life forms). While a bug is a complex thing (and a beast) and it takes sometimes days or weeks to chase and fix (kill) the one, a bugterium (bacterium) is of relatively smaller complexity and can be easily identified and dealt with by component removal or upgrade (massively killed). From software support perspective remember this bugtation No.14:

Crash dump analysis ”is anticipated with” joy, “performed with” eagerness, “and bragged about forever.”

Although the perceived simplicity of crash dump analysis is deceptive (bugtation No.2):

“It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious” crash.

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

Just realized that yesterday I wrote 100^th crash dump analysis pattern. Today I’m going to write 101^st. Just to remind that the fully classified color catalog of them is planned to be published:

Forthcoming CDAP Encyclopedia

More details will be announced closer to that date.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

Finally, previously announced book Baby Turing was released to manufacture. It is co-authored with my daughter and dedicated to my son. The short book annotation:

The genius of Albert Einstein was revolutionary in understanding reality of hardware (semantics of nature) but the genius of Alan Turing was revolutionary in understanding virtuality of software (syntax of computation). This book fills the gap in children’s literature and introduces binary arithmetic to babies.

The front cover:

The back cover:

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

Paperback edition of Memory Dump Analysis Anthology, Volume 2 is finally available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Search Inside is also available on Amazon. In addition, I updated the list of recommended books:

Listmania! Crash Dump Analysis and Debugging

Hardcover edition will be available on Amazon and B&N in 2-3 weeks.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -