The Old New Thing

July 2006 - Page 4 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Before you can learn to recognize what's wrong, you must learn to recognize what's right

July 10, 2006 Jul 10, 2006 07/10/06
Raymond Chen
Sometimes, when I'm debugging a problem, I'll ignore a particular thread and somebody will ask, "What is that thread doing, and how did you know to ignore it?" My reply: "I have no idea what it's doing, but whatever it's doing, it's normal." Tess has been running an excellent series of posts on debugging the CLR, but one of the most ...
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No, really, why is it 160×31?

July 7, 2006 Jul 7, 2006 07/7/06
Raymond Chen
When I discussed some time ago why minimized windows have an apparent size of 160x31, I explained that the minimized icon is a miniature title bar, but I managed not to explain why the values are exactly 160 and 31. The width of the miniature title bar is determined by the iWidth member of MINIMIZEDMETRICS structure. You can retrieve and ...

Nearly 20 percent of daily smokers say they exercise three or more times a week

July 6, 2006 Jul 6, 2006 07/6/06
Raymond Chen
Several months ago, The Seattle Times ran a story on people who smoke and also work out. In the article, personal trainer Will Baldyga compares it to other dissonant behavior such as pigging out on ice cream after a workout. I have to admit that on rare occasions, I lapse into such behavior ("justifying" bad eating habits with exercise), ...

Is the maximum size of the environment 32K or 64K?

July 6, 2006 Jul 6, 2006 07/6/06
Raymond Chen
There appears to be some confusion over whether the maximum size of the environment is 32K or 64K. Which is it? Both. The limit is 32,767 Unicode characters, which equals 65,534 bytes. Call it 32K or 64K as you wish, but make sure you include the units in your statement if it isn't clear from context...
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Retail companies allegedly not collecting personal information as aggressively

July 5, 2006 Jul 5, 2006 07/5/06
Raymond Chen
Several months ago, The Washington Post reported that retail companies were no longer collecting personal information as aggressively. The poster child for this sort of thing was RadioShack, which demanded your name and address even if you just stopped in to buy a pack of AA batteries. I didn't shop there often, and when I did, I merely ...

How do you use the bike rack on a Metro bus?

July 3, 2006 Jul 3, 2006 07/3/06
Raymond Chen
While it's true that I often ride the bus and often ride my bicycle, I do not often ride my bicycle onto a bus. This means that I forget how it's done and have to refresh my memory. Fortunately, Arlington Transit uses the same bike rack design as we do here in Metro King County, so I can refer to their detailed pictures instead of our ...

Security: Don't forget to initialize the stuff you don't care about

July 3, 2006 Jul 3, 2006 07/3/06
Raymond Chen
Lost in excitement of privilege escalation vulnerabilities is the simple information disclosure through missing garbage initialization. Everybody should by now be familiar with the use of the SecureZeroMemory function to ensure that buffers that used to contain sensitive information are erased, but you also have to zero out buffers before you...
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