May 2007

Revelations of My Friends: An ancestor of today's Mad Libs

Raymond Chen May 9, 2007 May 9, 2007 05/9/07

Literary detective Paul Collins stumbled upon a precursor to today's Mad Libs known as Revelations of My Friends. Listen to the NPR story to hear Scott Simon play, and go to Paul Collins' web site to see some of the drawing that Scott laughed at...

Don't be helpless: At least look at the function you're using

Raymond Chen May 9, 2007 May 9, 2007 05/9/07

Sometimes I see people ask a question and get an answer, but the answer doesn't quite work. But instead of trying to understand the answer in order to see why it doesn't work and develop a better solution, they just play stupid. Here's an example. The names have been changed but the story's the same. How do I get a handle to a bright pink ...

Session 0 isolation: Where backward compatibility loses to security

Raymond Chen May 8, 2007 May 8, 2007 05/8/07

One of the major changes to services in Windows Vista is session 0 isolation. After reading the summary, you can follow that first supplementary link, Impact of Session 0 Isolation on Services and Drivers in Windows Vista, to dig deeper and receive guidance on how you need to modify your service. Then again, some of the questions I see ...

The administrator is an idiot

Raymond Chen May 8, 2007 May 8, 2007 05/8/07

Nearly all computer administrators are idiots. That's not because the personnel department is incompetent or because it's impossible to train competent administrators. It's because, for a consumer operating system, the computer administrator didn't ask to be one. In nearly all cases, the computer administrator is dad or grandma.† They ...

Metromint: What were they thinking?

Raymond Chen May 7, 2007 May 7, 2007 05/7/07

Some friends gave me a bottle of spearmint Metromint as a gift. And as it turns out, it was a mean-spirited gift. Let's look at that bottle. It calls itself "pure, simple mintwater®". What the heck is pure mintwater? Do you go to the local mintwater stream and collect it? Oh, wait, sorry. That should be mintwater®. With some ...

Drag and drop is a general purpose transfer model, not exclusive to Explorer directories

Raymond Chen May 7, 2007 May 7, 2007 05/7/07

If you've designed your program so that it assumes that the the only thing a user can use drag/drop for is dropping your object into a file system directory, then you've already lost. piers wants to be able to determine the destination of a drag/drop operation. From the description, it appears that what piers really wants is the destination ...

But they're not (puts on sunglasses) going to get away with murder

Raymond Chen May 4, 2007 May 4, 2007 05/4/07

I don't even watch CSI: Miami, but this sequence of Endless Caruso One Liners cracks me up. The Wikipedia entry for Horatio Crane acknowledges the awesome power of the Sunglasses of Justice, and even Jim Carrey gets into the act...

How my lack of understanding of how processes exit on Windows XP forced a security patch to be recalled

Raymond Chen May 4, 2007 May 4, 2007 05/4/07

Last year, a Windows security update got a lot of flack for causing some machines to hang, and it was my fault. (This makes messing up a demo at the Financial Analysts Meeting look like small potatoes.) The security fix addressed a category of attacks wherein people could construct shortcut files or other items which specified a CLSID that was...

Unexpected consequences of self-checkout

Raymond Chen May 3, 2007 May 3, 2007 05/3/07

I heard an interesting report on Marketplace on surprises in the self-checkout lane. Impulse buying is down, and stores have come up with other ways to entice you into buying something you hadn't planned. And it turns out that fears from retailers that customers would cheat at the self-checkout turned out to be misplaced: The reality of the...

Quick overview of how processes exit on Windows XP

Raymond Chen May 3, 2007 May 3, 2007 05/3/07

Exiting is one of the scariest moments in the lifetime of a process. (Sort of how landing is one of the scariest moments of air travel.) Many of the details of how processes exit are left unspecified in Win32, so different Win32 implementations can follow different mechanisms. For example, Win32s, Windows 95, and Windows NT all shut...

The Old New Thing

May 2007 - Page 4 of 5 - The Old New Thing