Showing archive results for 2006

When writing the entry on Windows Integration Meetings, I was reminded of a team integration that didn't go quite so smoothly. I will not identify the teams involved because this is not an outlet for finger-pointing but rather a cautionary tale for managers and developers everywhere. Once upon a time, there were two teams developing projects that...

Some time ago, I discussed briefly the philosophy of API design that prevailed in the early days. One of the places this manifested itself was in the area of power management. As originally designed, power management was a cooperative affair (as was nearly everything in Windows in the early days). When the user attempted to put the computer into a...

PC World reports that eBay has set up a recycling initiative called rethink. The web site includes organizations that will accept donations or recycle your old equipment. In the Seattle area, the Take It Back Network will accept your old equipment for reuse or recycling. On the other hand, I have equipment so old nobody would take it.

The Windows NT family of operating systems supports symmetric multiprocessing. And symmetric really means symmetric. All the processors have to be the same speed, the same stepping, the same manufacturer. They must be identical in every way. If you break any of these rules, you will get strange results. Strange results from will be the leas...

Chris Sells reminded me of the Studs from Microsoft sketch (direct link to video), a parody of the dating game show Studs, as performed by the now-defunct local sketch comedy program Almost Live! And yes, in that sketch is Bill Nye at the midpoint of his rise to stardom. Between his careers as Boeing mechanical engineer and nationally-recognized...

Somewhat belatedly riffing on Larry and his discussion of time bombs in beta products, I'm reminded of one instance of a major PC manufacturer who apparently couldn't wait for Windows 95 to RTM. Tired of waiting, they shipped several thousands of machines with a late beta version of Windows 95 instead. That worked out really great. For...

Microspeak has its own lexicon. (Even larger dictionary here. I take issue with some of the definitions, but they are generally accurate.) In addition to the rather extensive use of the word "so" as an introductory particle, another peculiarity of Microspeak is the unusually frequent use of the word "super" as an intensifier, particular when used...

If you have a thread that owns a window, you should not be using the function, because that causes your thread to stop responding to messages for the duration of the sleep. This is true even for sleeps of short duration, such as sleeping for a few seconds and waking up in order to poll the state of something in the system. As we noted earlier, p...

My colleague who switched from program management to programming has this to say about unintended consequences: My take on this is that I developed through the needs of my job as a lead program manager the ability to talk to anyone at any time to get a particular issue dealt with, but that I didn't necessarily want to do this or enjoy the proc...

My colleague who manages to pack his entire office into a single box recently made the switch from program management to programming. I teased him, "So what's it like using an editor without a 'boldface' button?" His response was actually rather insightful. "Writing specifications is like writing a novel. Writing code is like writing poetry." Wh...