siwu’s blog

DWMaxx: Unleashing your DWM ;)

Hey folks, tonight (actually before going to bed), I want to introduce you to a tech preview of my new library: DWMaxx. It is using my weeks of research into the DWM, and at the moment I’m quite happy with the first results
By the way, I want to thank you all for your kind words about this project, thank you folks. I’m sorry I’m not replying all the emails, but at the moment I’m really hooked into real-life stuff. But fear not, I will reply!
Also, A BIG THANK YOU TO AVE, without him, much of the current design would not the way it is!

Everything you see is running on a P4E 3.0 GHz with a GeForce 7600 GS (it’s an AGP card, hence the 15-20 FPS only).

So, here we go, first demo: True Zooming

Hacking into Vista’s Desktop Window Manager (DWM)

Window texture is soooo last week, when you can manipulate the windows themselves

Jump for the (quite long I admit) story
Continue reading Hacking into Vista’s Desktop Window Manager (DWM)…

DWM Hacking, Extracting the Window Texture

Lately I’ve been working with Ave on this, and here are the first results:

Download MP4 videos directly from DailyMotion

So I have this shiny iPhone, and I must say, although I was skeptical when it came out, I love it. Thanks to it I can watch YouTube videos on it, and the other competitor (at least here in France), DailyMotion, has an iPhone “webapp” for it. Sweet!

After a while, I wanted to grab some videos and put them on my phone, so I started to search for an application that would allow me to convert flvs to mp4s, and eventually I found some. But the process is kinda slow, and when you think the iPhone plays the videos directly in mp4 from DailyMotion (and YouTube), you would find this utterly inefficient!

But thankfully for you guys, there is a way to download videos directly in mp4 from DailyMotion, and by directly, I don’t mean using some transcoding service. I mean directly.
So how do we do that? Well, I’ve created a simple tool for you to convert DailyMotion urls, to direct download MP4 urls
Continue reading Download MP4 videos directly from DailyMotion…

Fight censorship!

Fight censorship and DRMs! Here is the HD-DVD decryption key: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.

Combattons la censure et les DRMs! Voici la cle de decryptage HD-DVD: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.

Que representent ces chiffres etranges? Je veux bien vous expliquer…
Continue reading Fight censorship!…

Moving the blog to a new server

It started out when I wanted to configure url rewrites for my blog, but I ended up finding that my free webspace (free.fr), wasn’t supporting mod_rewrite. Even worse, the Apache server started to screw up a lot ! So I moved the blog to my 1and1 space, which does support mod_rewrite.
Also I can now fully enjoy my beloved siwu.info

Metered Sections: Illegitimate child of Mutexes and Critical Sections

A quick post to talk about something I came across lately.
Whenever you want to do exclusive access on resources or thread synchronization, two choices comes to mind: Mutexes, and Critical Sections. The first is slow, and the later is exclusive only and limited to the current process.

But guess what? The guys at Redmond created a monster: introduce Metered Sections.
“This article develops a new synchronization object called a metered section. It has the advantages of speed, the ability to synchronize across processes, the ability to control access to a shared resource with more than just mutual exclusion semantics (resource counting), and supports all current Win32 platforms.”

What is interesting is that this article is from 1998, and until now I didn’t heard anyone talking of it! Surely a nice thing to know about

Reverse Engineering the Windows XP Window Manager, Part 4: The real thing

Sooo, here we are. We finally reached the real PrintWindow() implementation. And before we start to comment, let’s take a look at the code:
Continue reading Reverse Engineering the Windows XP Window Manager, Part 4: The real thing…

Not much eh ?

Yeah yeah I know, it’s been a while since I last posted on this blog. Actually right now I’m quite busy with real life stuff since I’m getting a new job
But for those of you waiting, here is a tease of the articles I’ll be posting:

• Finishing the WinXP Window Manager reverse engineering
• Reversing the Vista DWM

Have fun

Reverse Engineering the Windows XP Window Manager, Part 3

In the previous part we managed to hunt down the real implementation of the PrintWindow API. Le’ts take a look at it. The functions is divided in 3 chunks:
Continue reading Reverse Engineering the Windows XP Window Manager, Part 3…