Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
The writing up of Windows research for free publication at this website stopped in September 2009. I had funded it from the proceeds of consultation services, and was mostly happy to do so as a five-year experiment to see what can be done. The five years ended in September 2009. How it looks to have turned out, at least for me in the various ways I have tried to make it work, is that research is just about sustainable (with much lowered ambition) when subsidised by consulting fees, but writing up the results is not.
That’s a matter of some disappointment to me. I like to think, and doubt that I am deluded, that these five years have produced the Internet’s most substantial repository of detailed, reliable information on undocumented Windows functions and features—particularly on the Windows Shell. If I had any business skills or were any good at raising funding, I would likely be no good at the research or the writing, let alone at both. Indeed, I doubt I should have tried to build this website. Yet without funding, the writing up, if not the research, has to stop.
If I am to resume any systematic attempt to write independent documentation of Windows features, it will be through an open-software initiative such as I propose at the new website www.soared.org.
If you value this website as a public good, then please recommend it to people who have the resources to fund it and may have the will. If all you have is an idea for possible funding, it’s very possibly more than occurs to me with my limited mind for these things, so please send me your suggestion.
Although I am convinced now that research of a high standard demands full-time attention—indeed, commitment—the fact is that the second-best way to get the research funded is to divert some time to commercial consultation, i.e., using skills and knowledge from the research to solve real-world problems for a fee. If you can’t help me find full-time funding, then by far the best support is to recommend my consultation services as widely and strongly as you can.
If you value this website as a free resource and would like to see the writing up resume, then please support the writing up financially. Yes, of course, it is then no longer a free resource. Worse, I can offer you no commitment that I won’t abandon the writing up even if you do help fund it (but not enough other people do). However, if a thousand of you each thought you are getting a good book’s worth of new content a year and each contributed the retail price of a good book, then the site’s continuation would be assured. With enough such support, research and writing could become full-time, and I would hope that something like the output from mid-2009, as I rushed to deliver the most from my experiment before suspending it, would become usual.
If you are a casual reader, having just been dropped here by a search engine, then I trust you have been impressed with the technical detail, but I ask that you please consider that the information I provide here is not just pulled from the ether and neither is it a recitation, collation or summary of work done by others. The detail—and especially its reliability—comes from studying the only true reference for any analysis of software, by which I mean the binary code. I have been developing the techniques for such analysis for 20 years and have got rather good at it, I think, but it does all still take time—and then it takes even more time to write up. If my time has saved you hours of head-scratching, then please consider a donation.
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Just in case you imagine that I’m getting rich this way, you may like to know the total of donations received thus far: $330.