ResearchBuzz pointed out still more google search keywords like area codes, UPC, and whois. I'm still waiting for PLU, those code numbers on the food in the produce aisle. Here's a brief history of PLU codes for those geeky enough to care (like me).
Believe it or not, calling conventions is one of the things that programs frequently get wrong. The compiler yells at you when you mismatch a calling convention, but lazy programmers will just stick a cast in there to get the compiler to "shut up already". And then Windows is stuck having to support your buggy code forever. The window procedure ...
The last architecture I'm going to cover in this series is the AMD64 architecture (also known as x86-64). The AMD64 takes the traditional x86 and expands the registers to 64 bits, naming them rax, rbx, etc. It also adds eight more general purpose registers, named simply R8 through R15. Here's a sample: On entry to CallThatFunction, the stack lo...
As I was driving through Seattle the other day, I saw a sign for a personal storage company called "Stor-More". I then had to laugh because in Swedish, "Stor-Mor" means "Big Momma". It's not restricted to Swedish. On my trip to Germany last year, my travelling companions found several German signs amusing: When he told some German colleagues a...
A whirlwind tour of an exotic architecture.
The dllexport attribute tells the linker to generate an export table entry for the specified function. This export entry is decorated. This is necessary to support ing of overloaded functions. But it also means that the string you pass to needs to be decorated. As we learned earlier, the decoration scheme varies from architecture to architectur...
The characters on the television program "Friends" are apparently trendsetters in the use of the word "so". [People with way too much time on their hands] spent a year going through transcripts from each episode of the first eight seasons of Friends, taking note of every single adjective... [T]he show's popularity peaked at the same ti...
The wonderful people who ran blogs.gotdotnet.com, as a parting gift, migrated all the old content into this blog. They're awesome, aren't they?
According to Friday's Klartext (note: link valid only for one week, then it gets overwritten by the next Friday's Klartext), Vi ska börjar klartext med berätta att en åklagare nu ska undersöka om fler än två hundra poliser i Sverige har brutit mot lagen. Poliserna letade rätt på information om mordet p&a...
Apparently a ten-year-old who put Microsoft Flight Simulator on his Christmas wish-list became the subject of a terrorism investigation. (Warning: I suspect that link will go stale in a week, so read it while you still can.) As always, The Register puts a snarky spin on the story.
