On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 8:48 AM, Paul Chitescu <paulc@voip.null.ro> wrote:
On Monday 05 July 2010 05:15:50 pm Erich Hoover wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 8:03 AM, Dan Kegel <dank@kegel.com> wrote:
> [...]
> A long time ago (Win2K era) I wrote an application for Windows that replaced
> the text everywhere (that wouldn't crash the OS) with "All Your Base Are
> Belong To Us."  At least at the time, you could rely on the window class to
> differentiate between different types of windows (dialogs vs. menus vs.
> different types of controls).  Taking advantage of this behavior was
> especially important in IE, which would crash the whole OS if you changed
> the text of any of its menus.
>
> Erich Hoover
> ehoover@mines.edu

Cool!

... but does it run in wine?

I highly doubt that I've retained that application anywhere (I'd have to look, but I believe the drive with those old test programs failed), and I'm a tad bit too busy right now to attempt to recreate it.  However, if Wine doesn't use a different class for dialogs than for normal windows then I doubt it.  If I remember correctly, I had to use the window class to detect file dialogs and not change the text of some of the controls.

You may not even be able to do this kind of thing in Windows anymore with all the new security-minded stuff they've supposedly added.  I may not have even tested it on Win2K, though I know I tested on 98 and Me.  I remember thinking at the time that allowing a user-level application to send messages to other apps like that was a bad idea.  The thing that really struck me was that you could identify the taskbar by its window class and then inject your own buttons onto it, which you could conceivably use to really mess with the user.  I didn't take it any further than that though, at that point I got bored with it and I'm not particularly interested in screwing with people.  The AYBABTU thing was more of a curiosity thing, it was a popular meme at the time and I was experimenting with how far you could really go with telling other applications what to do.

Erich Hoover
ehoover@mines.edu