Showing archive results for 2006

Some people suggested, as a solution to the network interoperability compatibility problem, adding a flag to to indicate whether the caller wanted to use fast or slow enumeration. Adding a flag to work around a driver bug doesn't actually solve anything in the long term. Considering all the video driver bugs that Windows has had to work arou...

I may have scared a bunch of people with that chart of German adjective endings, but as several commenters noted, native speakers don't refer to the charts; they just say what comes naturally. (Well, except for Leo Petr, who claims that native Russian speakers actually study these charts in grade school.) Commenter Helga Waage noted that one qui...

A common suggestion is that if a problem is detected which the system automatically recovered from but which an administrator might be interested in knowing about, then an event log entry should be created. Be careful, however, not to abuse the event log in the process. If the problem is not security-related and it can occur, say, more than a few ...

Another episode in the sporadic series on the wisdom of seventh graders: The topic this time is "What do you want to be when you grow up?" The students really enjoyed this topic because, as one young man put it, "I could write a book about myself!" Here are what some students had to say. Spelling mistakes are intact, but ellipses are editorial. (I ...

Mistakes were made. Mistakes such as having Windows NT put Notepad in a different location from Windows 3.1. (Though I'm sure they had their reasons.) Mistakes such as having a when there is already a style. Mistakes such as having listview state images be one-biased, whereas treeview state images are zero-biased. But what's done is ...

Okay, there were an awful lot of comments yesterday and it will take me a while to work through them all. But I'll start with some more background on the problem and clarifying some issues that people had misinterpreted. As a few people surmised, the network file server software in question is Samba, a version of which comes with most Linux dis...

A friend of mine is taking a vacation to Germany with her husband, and she asked me for help in booking a guest room in a seminary in one of the cities they will be visiting. I translated her initial inquiry into German, and she e-mailed both the English and German versions to the manager. The response was entirely in German. For the next few day...

Okay, everybody, here's your chance to solve a compatibility problem. There is no answer yet; I'm looking to see how you folks would attack it. This is a real bug in the Windows Vista database. A beta tester reported that Explorer fails to show more than about a hundred files per directory from file servers running a particular brand of the file s...

One mark of punctuation can make all the difference. One program was encountering a stack overflow exception in a function that didn't appear to be doing anything particularly stack-hungry. The following code illustrates the problem: (In reality, the algorithm for comparing two tests results was much more complicated, but that's irrelevant to...

Kyle James reports for a variety of public radio programs and networks, including Deutsche Welle via Worldview (see March 26), NPR, and PRI's Marketplace. His English grammar is perfect, the pronunciation impeccably American, but if you listen, you'll still notice something odd about his voice. It may even take you a few listens before you figur...