Showing archive results for 2006

Masking a bug just creates a different, harder-to-find, bug.

In an attempt to explain why astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper fainted during a welcome ceremony, ABC News reported The heart of an average person on Earth pumps blood throughout the body. But when an astronaut is in space, Levine explained, the blood remains predominantly in their chest cavity. Because of this, he said, the heart tries to ...

"Isn't DDE all asynchronous anyway?" asks commenter KaiArnold. It's mostly asynchronous, but not entirely. You can read about how DDE works in MSDN, but since it seems people are reluctant to read the formal documentation, I'll repeat here the points relevant to the discussion. The DDE process begins with a search for a service provider. This i...

A few weeks ago, filming for the movie Battle in Seattle began. In Vancouver. Serves us right.

Last time, I left you with a few questions. Part of the answer to the first question was given in the comments, so I'll just link to that. The problem is more than just typeahead, though. The dialog box doesn't show itself until all message traffic has gone idle. If you actually ran the code presented in the original message, you'd find that it ...

When I was in Los Angeles for Thanksgiving, I began noticing the hand gestures that accompanied numbers. When people said "six", they often punctuated it by holding out their hand with the thumb and pinky extended, palm towards the speaker. That's because they were using Chinese number gestures. (It so happens that the gesture for "six" is the sam...

One customer wanted to wait until the dialog box was displayed before displaying its own dialog box. (Personally, I think immediately displaying a doubly-nested dialog box counts as starting off on the wrong foot from a usability standpoint, but let's set that issue aside for now.) The customer discovered that displaying the nested dialog box in r...

Today is the 2006 Microsoft Company Meeting, and with it the continuation of what I consider to be one of the most annoying Company Meeting traditions: The group that cheers wildly any time their project name is mentioned. It's never the same group year to year. Instead, a different group (or groups) independent decides to be the annoying one for ...

Occasionally, a customer will ask for a way they can restrict what the administrator can do. The short answer to this is, "Um, no, that's why they're called 'Administrator'." You can try to set up roadblocks, say, ACL files to revoke access to a file you don't want the administrator to read, but the Administrator can always take ownership of the fi...

Yesterday were held the primary elections in the state of Washington. Most of the partisan positions were uncontested, so there wasn't much to research. The one with the most candidates was for one of the state's Senate seats, and among those candidates were some who might be considered "a bit unorthodox". None of these candidates appears to hav...