Hey everyone, I just wanted to let you know that MANDIANT Highlighter v1.1.1 is released and ready to rock and roll!

MANDIANT is proud to announce a new version of Highlighter (version 1.1.1).  There are big changes between our previous release and this one, so grab it while it’s hot!  The biggest enhancements are bolded in the change log below.   Download it at mandiant.com/software/highlighter.htm.

Don’t forget that we’re relying on the user community to suggest improvements.  Check out forums.mandiant.com and head to the Highlighter section to give us your input.  Feedback, feature requests, bugs, and use-cases are all very welcome.

Change Log (since v1.0.1):

• Fix: Tabs were mistakenly removed by input sanitization. This has been corrected.
• Fix: The highlight hit count was incorrect - an additional hit per line was mistakenly being added. This has been corrected.
• Fix: The events over time histogram was not properly displaying highlights. This has been corrected.
• Fix: If text was selected in the textbox, and the user clicked on the highlight button, the selection would not be highlighted. This has been corrected.
• Enhancement: The graphic overview now draws much faster.
• New Feature: The textbox is now a 100% custom control. It is virtualized, and supports a wider range of visual display effects. When words are highlighted, the actual word on each line will be surrounded by a colored translucent bubble with a slightly darkened border. The textbox selection and scrolling behavior is now more like a traditional Windows textbox.
• New Feature: Highlighter will now open MUCH larger files. NOTE: Highlighter now keeps a file open while you are working with it.
• New Feature: Highlighter will now accept a list of terms, one on a line, as input to automatically highlight or remove lines. Look under the right click menu, Highlight -> Import Simple List and under Line Operations -> Remove Using Simple List.
• Enhancement: Files will now open somewhat more quickly due to optimization of calculating the MD5 sum of the file.
• Enhancement: The events over time histogram has sharper numbers on the X and Y axis.
• Fix: The events over time histogram scale now properly adjusts when when switching from linear to log mode.
• Fix: A number of State issues were resolved.
• Fix: Various other minor bugs.
• New Feature: Highlighter support opening a document from a Mandiant Intelligent Response (MIR) controller. Look for the new option from the File -> Open menu.
• New Feature: Highlighter will add a Windows Explorer shell extension by default.
• Fix: A number of State issues were resolved, including improper handling of when a selection included a comma.
• Fix: A race condition existed in the implementation of retrieving lines from the current file.
• Fix: Not all hotkeys were actually implemented in code.
• Fix: Highlight counts in the status bar were incorrect sometimes.
• Fix: Sometimes you could not scroll to the bottom of a file using the scrollbar.
• Fix: Events over time histogram had a very sparse appearance.
• Fix: After opening a file, you could not use hotkeys like CTRL-O to open files, nor could you do things like ALT-F4 or any other key sequence with modifiers.
• Fix: The remove feature would not remove lines with selections that contained a TAB.
• Fix: Various other minor bugs.

We use Outlook 2007 at work to manage all our emails, calendars, and contacts.  I use the “Move to folder…” option all the time to help manage my inbox and something weird happened the other day: I used the “Move to folder…” drop down in the toolbar, selected the destination folder name, and the messages left my inbox, as expected.  I went to check some information by opening the destination folder and the messages weren’t there!  I searched All Mail for the messages that were in my inbox 10 seconds ago and there no hits were returned… that’s not good.

It turns out that Outlook does not visually differentiate between archival folders (backed up to a .pst) and those in the current profile.  So what happened was, somehow the shortcut to my archival folder (with the same name of course because that’s how archiving works) was in my toolbar dropdown and so I sent them to the archive folder instead of the intended folder.  I opened the archive in Outlook.  Lo and behold there they were.  30 minutes into this damned thing, I moved them back to my “live” destination folder and all was right in my world once again.

Ok, so Highlighter is that log file analysis tool that Jason Luttgens and I created and Nick Harbour contributed a huge amount to in version 1.1 (thanks Nick!).  We just finished 1.1 and it will be released very soon — next week?  In subversion, we created a branch and we basically stopped making any changes to the trunk.  When we were done with the 1.1 dev, we wanted to merge the two copies together.

Step #1: Merge trunk into branch - completed no problem

Step #2: Commit branch - completed no problem

Step #3: Merge branch into trunk - text conflicts and tree conflicts up the wazoo!

I actually went to a bunch of local developers who use subversion regularly and none of those I spoke with knew the answer to my woes.  So I did some research and came upon http://blogs.open.collab.net/svn/2009/03/subversion-160-and-tree-conflicts.html.  Thank god!  I had already deleted all the files from trunk and committed them so I was in a ready state for the steps in that blog post:

New Step#3: svn delete all the files in trunk

Step #4: manually copy all files from branch to trunk (I did this with an export)

Step #5: commit the trunk - completed no problem!

Whew… that was a friggin headache that kept me searching the intertubes for a good 2 hours.  If you have svn questions or solutions, let me know because I’m working with it more and more.  While version control can be a real hassle to forward momentum, I think it’s a great tool.

I am not promoting either Happy Feet or Missy Elliot (because I’ve never seen Happy Feet, though I like Missy).  This is a terrific synch-job between one of her songs and the movie — check it out (I don’t know if the lyrics are youth-appropriate).

[edit: movie replaced on 13 Apr 2009]

I’ve had this weird problem while playing games for the past couple years — at some indeterminate interval (admittedly, I haven’t attempted to measure the time because I’m usually very intent on the game), while moving or shooting… basically doing anything involving my mouse, my “character” is immediately turned around. In other words, I’m running North one instant and South the next. I don’t know if it’s exactly 180deg, but I do know that I often get killed because of this issue.

I searched around with various Google searches:
“mouse error jumps OR flips 180 degrees during game”
“mouse error jumps OR flips automatically”
“mouse error jumps OR flips automatically during game”
and so on… I found one possible hit that remarks it’s a Linux-only problem… obviously not since I’m running XP SP3.

I have had this problem with World of Warcraft and Battlefield 2, though I cannot remember (and have not played recently enough) if it happens with Half-Life or HL engine games.

If anyone knows what this is, please comment here. Thanks! I’ll also update if I find a solution.