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April 30, 2007Apr 30, 200704/30/07Last year, a request was sent out to a social mailing list that went something like this:
Hi, everybody. My girlfriend is coming to visit for a week, and she’s a pianist. Does anybody have a piano they would be willing to let her practice on while she’s here?
April 30, 2007Apr 30, 200704/30/07If you hunt around the Internet you’ll find lots of people† who hard-code the string “open” as the second parameter to the ShellExecute function, indicating that they want to open the document specified as the third parameter. While that’s a nice thing to want to do,
April 27, 2007Apr 27, 200704/27/07The Mesa (Arizona) Police Department reminds us in a press release that 9-1-1 is for emergencies, and the inability to watch Jay Leno due to a power outage does not qualify as an emergency.
(Noting, because everybody else will, that this is not the same as the unconfirmed of the woman who called 9-1-1 for a cheeseburger emergency.)
Update: First link appears to be dead.
April 27, 2007Apr 27, 200704/27/07Back in the old days, if you wanted to call a function from
inside the debugger, you had to do it by hand:
Save the registers, push the parameters onto the stack
(or into registers if the function uses fastcall
or thiscall)
push the address of the ntdll!DbgBreakPoint function,
April 26, 2007Apr 26, 200704/26/07An Australian mathematician applied intermediate value theory to the problem of keeping a table from wobbling: Just rotate the table and you’ll eventually find a spot.
A few things struck me about that article. First, that it explains that intermediate value theory “is the same principle underlying the fact that there will always be two points with exactly the same temperature somewhere on Earth.”
April 26, 2007Apr 26, 200704/26/07Somebody says, “Your program is consuming 100% CPU”
and hands you a debug session.
Usually, this happens because one thread has gotten stuck
in an infinite loop.
And if you’re lucky it’s the type of infinite loop that’s
easy to diagnose because it’s just one function that isn’t
returning.
April 25, 2007Apr 25, 200704/25/07Actor Christopher Walken has such a peculiar speaking style, he’s inspired a theater show: All About Walken. The run ends soon, so if you’re going to see it, you’ll have to act fast.
April 25, 2007Apr 25, 200704/25/07Okay, so I gave it away in the title, but follow along anyway.
Your program chugs along and then suddenly it crashes like this:
eax=06bad8e8 ebx=00000000 ecx=1e1cfdf0 edx=00000000 esi=06b9a680 edi=01812950
eip=1180ab57 esp=001178b4 ebp=001178c0 iopl=0 nv up ei pl nz na pe nc
cs=001b ss=0023 ds=0023 es=0023 fs=003b gs=0000 efl=00010206
ABC!FunctionX+0x1f:
1180ab57 ff5108 call dword ptr [ecx+8] ds:0023:1e1cfdf8=????????
April 24, 2007Apr 24, 200704/24/07It sounds like the set-up to an old joke, but it’s not. It’s just one of the random bits of trivia that I wondered about.
For intersections with both high pedestrian and high vehicle volumes, I was able to find the Federal Highway Administration recommendation,
April 24, 2007Apr 24, 200704/24/07When you’re debugging,
you might have a pointer to a COM interface and want to know
what the underlying object is.
Now, sometimes this trick won’t work because the interface pointer
actually points to a stub or proxy,
but in the case where no marshalling is involved,
