November 2006

It took two of us to keep up with one Bob

Raymond Chen November 30, 2006 Nov 30, 2006 11/30/06

One of my friends (let's call him "Bob") retired from Microsoft many years ago. Bob is an amazing programmer whose skills I remain in awe of. I remember visiting his office one evening with a mutual friend ("Fred") to catch up on things. When we turned up, he showed us a problem that he was working on. He was doing some sort of fancy graphics...

A fork is an easy-to-find nonstandard USB device

Raymond Chen November 29, 2006 Nov 29, 2006 11/29/06

Remember the Ten Immutable Laws of Security. Today, we're going to talk about number three: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer any more. There was a bug which floated past my field of vision many months ago that went something like this: "I found a critical security bug in the USB stack. If...

What went wrong in Windows 95 if you use a system color brush as your background brush?

Raymond Chen November 28, 2006 Nov 28, 2006 11/28/06

If you want to register a window class and use a system color as its background color, you set the hbrBackground member to the desired color, plus one, cast to an HBRUSH: Windows 95 introduced "system color brushes", which are a magic type of brush which always paint in the corresponding system color, even if the system color changes...

It's not surprising at all that people search for Yahoo

Raymond Chen November 27, 2006 Nov 27, 2006 11/27/06

Earlier this year, one columnist was baffled as to why "Yahoo" was the most searched-for term on Google. I wasn't baffled at all. Back in 2001, Alexa published the top ten most searched-for terms on their service, and four of the top ten were URLs: yahoo.com, hotmail.com, aol.com, and ebay.com. A lot of people simply don't care to learn the ...

Sometimes you need to recalibrate your progress reports

Raymond Chen November 24, 2006 Nov 24, 2006 11/24/06

One of my former managers told me this story from a project he worked on many years ago. This project was broken up into multiple groups, and there was a weekly meeting where representatives from each group got together to discuss how the project was going. One of the groups was responsible for generating the reports and analysis. This was an...

Placebo setting: QoS bandwidth reservation

Raymond Chen November 23, 2006 Nov 23, 2006 11/23/06

A placebo setting that has been getting a lot of play in recent years is that of QoS bandwidth reservation. The setting in question sets a maximum amount of bandwidth that can be reserved for QoS. I guess one thing people forgot to notice is the word "maximum". It doesn't set the amount of reserved bandwidth, just the maximum. Changing the ...

The quiet dream of placebo settings

Raymond Chen November 22, 2006 Nov 22, 2006 11/22/06

Back in the Windows 95 days, people swore that increasing the value of MaxBPs in the system.ini file fixed application errors. People usually made up some pseudo-scientific explanation for why this fixed crashes. These explanations were complete rot. These breakpoints had nothing to do with Windows applications. They were used by 32-bit ...

What is the process by which the cursor gets set?

Raymond Chen November 21, 2006 Nov 21, 2006 11/21/06

Commenter LittleHelper asked, "Why is the cursor associated with the class and not the window?" This question makes the implicit assumption that the cursor is associated with the class. While there is a cursor associated with each window class, it is the window that decides what cursor to use. The cursor-setting process is described in the ...

Paradoxically, you should remove the smart card when logging on with a smart card

Raymond Chen November 20, 2006 Nov 20, 2006 11/20/06

To connect to the Microsoft corporate network from home, employees need to use smartcard authentication. But, somewhat paradoxically, you do better if you remove the smart card. A colleague of mine tipped me off to this. To initiate the connection, you have to insert the smart card and provide the smart card password. Then the system ...

It takes only one program to foul an upgrade

Raymond Chen November 20, 2006 Nov 20, 2006 11/20/06

"Worst software ever." That was Aaron Zupancic's cousin's reaction to the fact that Windows XP was incompatible with one program originally designed for Windows 98. Then again, commenter Aargh! says "The bad code should be fixed, period. If it can't be fixed, it breaks, too bad." Perhaps Aargh! can send a message to Aaron's ...

The Old New Thing

November 2006 - The Old New Thing