Love lures French kids to German: Come and learn German - a language of love! Hundreds of advertisements in France this week will promote the unusual message to try to woo teenagers to a language they often consider difficult and ugly. "Language is the key to understand a partner, his culture, working manners and lifestyle," [Frenc...
If you had a program that didn't process messages for a while, but it needed to be painted for whatever reason (say, somebody uncovered it), Windows would eventually lose patience with you and paint your window white. Or at least, that's what people would claim. Actually, Windows is painting your window with your class background brush. Since most...
Cell phones top the latest Lemelson-MIT Invention Index survey, asking people to name the invention that you hate the most yet cannot live without. [Link fixed 8:22am]
Disappeared into the cracks.
Any crash report that involves a buffer overrun quickly escalates in priority. The last few that came my way were actually bugs in other programs that were detected by Windows. For example, there were a few programs that responded to the LVN_GETDISPINFO notification by overflowing the LVITEM.pszText buffer, writing more than LVITEM.cchTextMax char...
My code samples assume you are using the latest header files from the Platform SDK (free download), the one that includes support for Win64. If you have an older SDK then you won't have various new data types like UINT_PTR and INT_PTR and should just use UINT and INT. I write code that is Win64-compliant as a matter of course since all code in Wi...
As I mentioned yesterday, the ia64 is a very demanding architecture. Today I'll discuss another way that lying to the compiler will come back and bite you. The ia64 does not have an absolute addressing mode. Instead, you access your global variables through the r1 register, nicknamed "gp" (global pointer). This register always points to your globa...
Accidentally stumbling over poison.
I suspect Tanzi isn't going to get much sympathy from, well, anybody. Parmalat's Tanzi is "Depressed" Lawyers for Calisto Tanzi, the jailed head of now-bankrupt European food and dairy group Parmalat, claim that he is "depressed" in prison, constantly asking about his family. The lawyers have suggested that Tanzi be released from prison and plac...
Continuing from yesterday: The x86 architecture traditionally uses the EBP register to establish a stack frame. A typical function prologue goes like this: This establishes a stack frame that looks like this, for, say, a __stdcall function that takes two parameters. Parameters can be accessed with positive offsets from EBP; for example, par...
