Changing another Process Locale - process

From my own "key logger like" process I figured out that another process Locale is wrong (i.e. by sniffing few keys, I figured out that the foreground process Locale should be something while it is set to another). What's the best way to do this?

I'd use setLocale from within that process to change it, and notify the process about this with some form of IPC like:
signals
sockets
pipes
from the process who knows

You didn't specify operating system or anything, but in Linux this is quite hard unless the target process is willing to help (i.e. there's some IPC mechanism available where you can ask the process to do it for you)
What you can do is to attach to the process, like a debugger or strace does, and the call the appropriate system call (like setlocale())
The result on the target process is of course undetermined since it probably doesn't expect to get its locale changed under its feet :)

Related

blocked requests in io_service

I have implemented client server program using boost::asio library.
In my implementation there are times when io_service.run() blocks indefinitely. In case I pass another request to io_service, the blocked call begins to execute normally.
Is there any way to see what are the pending requests inside the io_service queue ?
I have not used work object to block the run call!
There are no official ways to query into the io_service to find all pending request. However, there are a few techniques to debug the problem:
Boost 1.47 introduced handler tracking. Simply define BOOST_ASIO_ENABLE_HANDLER_TRACKING and Boost.Asio will write debug output, including timestamps, an identifier, and the operation type, to the standard error stream.
Attach a debugger dig through the layers to find and examine operation queues. This answer covers both understanding handler tracking and using a debugger to examine an operation queue for the epoll_reactor.
Finally, if you believe it is a bug, then it may be worth updating to the latest version or checking the revision history for relevant changes. Regardless, describing the problem in more detail may allow others to help identify the source of the problem and potential solutions.
Now i spent a few hours reading and experimenting (i need more boost::asio functionality for work as well) and it turns out: Kind of.
But it is not as straightforward or readable as one might hope.
Under the hood (well, under the outermost hood) io_service has a bunch of other services registered, which do the work async_ operations of their respective fields require.
These are the "Services" described in the reference.
Now sadly, the services stay registered, wether there is work to do or not. For example if your io_service has a udp socket, it will still have all the corresponding services, even if the socket itself is inactive.
But you can ask your io_service which services it has. Lets say you want to know wether your io_service called m_io_service has an udp datagram_socket_service. Then you can call something like:
if (boost::asio::has_service<boost::asio::datagram_socket_service<boost::asio::ip::udp> >(m_io_service))
{
//Whatever
}
That does not help a lot, because it will be true no matter wether the socket is active or not. But after you know, that you have that service, you can get a ref to it using use_service instead of has_service but with the same elegant amount of <>.
And now you can inspect the service to see what it is up to. Sadly, it will not tell you what the outstanding handlers names are (probably partly because it does not know them) but if it is a socket, you can get its implemention_type and with that check whether it currently is_open or find either the local_endpoint as well as the remote_endpoint.
In case of a deadline_timer_service you can, among other stuff, find out when it expires_at.
See the reference for more information what the service is and is not willing to tell you.
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_54_0/doc/html/boost_asio/reference.html
This information should then hopefully allow you to determine which async_ operation did not return.
And if not, at the very least you can cancel any unexpectedly active services.

To find the process running in task manager and to kill the process

I have a windows mobile application
I have noticed that it properly terminate on exiting, they simply minimize and take up memory. I need to cehck whether any instance of the same application is running in the taskmanager.If exists, i need to kill the process.
I need to write small app that would loop through all open application processes and terminate the required one.
Does such an application exist? If not, which onecould I use to write my own app for it?
Typically this is not how you solve this problem.
You should hold a 'mutex' in your application, and when it launches a second time, you first check this mutex, and if it's taken, you know your app is already running.
Find an appropriate global mutex to hold, and then check for it (I'm not sure what sort you can use on whatever version of Windows Mobile you are targetting, but a trivial search should help you find the answer).
If your app shows an [X] in the corner that's a Minimize button. Change the MinimizeButton property of the form and it will become an [ok] button which will close it.
The CF under Windows Mobile already enforces application singleton behavior. If the app is already running, the CF will look for it, find it, and bring it to the fore for you. No extra work needed.
If you really want to find the process and terminate it, that's done with the toolhelp API set. You can P/Invoke it or use the classes in the Smart Device Framework.

how to get a physical printer status before printing job is sent?

I have a rather unusual problem. I am using xpdfprint binary for the print job from my application. But if the user has a "directly print to the printer" setting enabled and by mistake if the printer is not available (power failure or cord not plugged in) then the application hangs. It seems to be a standard behaviour since in my machine other windows applications also behave the same way. Problem is, in this case the printer timeout is not happening, neither it returns an error. It is waiting on the synchronous call to finish the printing. Is there anyway I can handle this situation? I am forced to find a solution because of a demanding customer. If by some means I get the physical printer status before the printing job is sent, I could solve this problem to an extent. Mine is a windows application and the coding is largely done in C#. If anybody has a win32 sample code please share with me.
Thanks in advance for any kind of help.
If the printer isn't connected then don't have a print menu item enabled, with a message.
Then, you just check every so often on the status.
You may find this of interest to check the status:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/printing/printeroffline.aspx

Socket programming and telnet with VB.net

I'm writing a GUI-based app in VB.net that talks to a LambdaMOO server via telnet, sends commands to display the object hierarchy, then parses the output and creates a visual representation of the object hierarchy.
So my question is: is there some kind of "telnet client" class for .NET to simplify the sending and receiving of data, or do I have to write my own using the socket API?
Does Mono have something like this?
Barring an easy solution, does anyone have a good tutorial they can point to for telnet client programming in VB.net?
Ok, I had a similar issue and ignoring all security complications and the like, wanted to TELNET from a VB initiated connection to a remote device and do stuff. I concur that the whole negotiation process is a hellish thing to do but once you've worked it out it's actually pretty simple to implement. I decided not to stop because I kept reading things that said it couldn't be done when it clearly can be done if you can write and read 1's and 0's into/from a network stream.
The code in the link below will initiate the connection and get you through to actually exchanging clear text information over TELNET. Given the example of sending a username and password combo shows how to read and write to the connection.
Big tips - initially have a nice big textbox or something to trap everything that comes into the buffer (variable returndata). This will help you diagnose problems. Also check on my blog there how to do this without the textbox blinking like a flashing thing. Once you've done all that and you know your script is reliable, trun off any screen updates and it will whizz through rather than take an age.
Apologies for the really dirty code and the crappy website layout.
http://myhead-online.blogspot.com/2009/05/vb-net2008-express-telnet-to-sun.html
The telnet protocol is basically just the usual TCP protocol, with a bunch of optional stuff that you probably won't need to implement. So you'd open a socket and start sending and receiving data with the socket stream interface.
Give it a try with the regular socket API, you'll probably find that it's quite straightforward.
just a suggestion. you may try to program your vb application to execute an existing telnet application in batch mode.
here is the link for your reference. refer to 7.3 Using Plink in batch files and scripts. Hope it helps.
You can grab one of any number of libraries to use. Here's one library:
LINK
For others try googling something along the lines of: library telnet mud .NET
Lastly, there are any number of opensource MUD/MOO/MUSH projects open at any time who are willing the share ideas and looking for people to help with projects.
I had my trials with telnet. You've to use tools like wireshark in conjuntion to figure out what commands needs to be initiated. I did find communicating with my unix box quite a challenge. For one thing you must know your telnet instructions. You might find it difficult to determined the state of the application - whether it is logged in or not innately. You'd have to formulate your own logic for it.
Another thing you'd have to do is parse the bytes returned by telnet into commands or instruction data i.e. you have to know if the bytes received is an instruction or some other thing it is trying to send you. Here is a ref that would come in handy.
First I suggest you start using the wireshark tool and get the communications send to and fro manually as well as via application.
From the LambdaMOO end of things, if you have wizard access or are friends with someone who does, you can have the MOO give you the data over another protocol that you might be able to work with more readily, such as HTTP. All you need is an object on the MOO with a do_login_command() set to handle requests, and then use the listen() builtin to get that object to listen on a given port. As long as a protocol doesn't require anything complex SSL, it's fairly easy to code up on the MOO end. So that might be worthwhile if VB.net has easier handling for HTTP etc.

Cocoa Distributed Objects, Long Polling, launchd and "Not Responding" in Activity Monitor

Scenario:
I have a Distributed-objects-based IPC between a mac application and a launchd daemon (written with Foundation classes). Since I had issues before regarding asynchronous messaging (e.g. I have a registerClient: on the server's root object and whenever there's an event the server's root object notifies / calls a method in the client's proxy object), I did long-polling which meant that the client "harvests" lists of events / notifications from the daemon. This "harvest" is done through a server object method call, which then returns an NSArray instance.
It works pretty well, until for a few seconds, the server object's process (launched thru launchd) starts being labeled red with the "(Not responding)" tag beside it (inside Activity Monitor). Like I said, functionally, it works well, but we just want to get rid of this "Not responding" label.
How can I prevent this "Not responding" tag?
FYI, I already did launchd-based processes before and this is the first time I did long-polling. Also, I tried NSSocketPortNameServer-based connections and also NSSocketPort-based ones. They didn't have this problem. Locking wasn't also an issue 'coz the locks used were only NSCondition's and we logged and debugged the program and it seems like the only locking "issue" is on the harvesting part, which actually, functionally works. Also, client-process is written in PyObjC while server process was written using ObjC.
Thanks in advance.
Sample the process to find out what it's doing or waiting on.
Peter's correct in the approach, though you may be able to figure it out through simple inspection. "Not responding" means that you're not processing events on your event queue for at least 5 seconds (used to be 2 seconds, but they upped it in 10.4). For a UI process, this would create a spinning wait cursor, but for a non-UI process, you're not seeing the effects as easily.
If this is a runloop-based program, it means you're probably doing something with a blocking (synchronous) operation that should be done with the run loop and a callback (async). Alternately, you need a second thread to process your blocking operations so your mainthread can continue to respond to events.
My problem was actually the call for getting a process's PID using the signature FNDR... that part caused the "Not responding" error and it never was the locks or the long-polling part. Sorry about this guys. But thank God I already found the answer.