Showing archive results for 2007

The recent passing of Madeleine L'Engle reminded me of a quiz seventh grade students were given in order to see whether they were at least paying attention during a reading of a chapter from A Wrinkle in Time. I forget the question exactly, but it asked the students about the mechanism that Mrs Who, Which and Whatsit use to travel through the univ...

Daniel Chait wonders why we have both and . You know, I wonder the same thing. But I'm going to make an educated guess. Actually, most of what I write is just a lot of educated guessing. Like my explanation of why has such complicated rules? A guess. Why address space granularity is 64KB? A guess. Why most messages are in the system message...

Last year, NPR covered The Minimalist Jukebox Festival, a week-long exploration of the school of minimalist music. The NPR story includes a clip of my favorite minimalist work: Music for 18 Musicians, as well as a telling of the classic minimalism knock-knock joke. I remember reading somewhere that the world premiere of Music for 18 Musicians w...

When I discussed which message numbers belong to whom, you may have noticed that the messages for edit boxes, buttons, list boxes, combo boxes, scroll bars, and static controls go into the system range even though they are control-specific. How did those messages end up there? They didn't start out there. In 16-bit windows, these control-spec...

Digging through my pile of junk, I found a reference to a fake article in The New Yorker magazine titled My Fake Job that turned out to be (partly) fake itself. Unfortunately, I missed the article the first time around so I didn't get to see what all the excitement was about, but it sure sounded like a funny article. (Fractionally more details fr...

Some time ago, the application compatibility folks found a program that was corrupting the heap, and they applied a fix that worked around the specific type of corruption that the program performed. And then a bug came on that same program. It was a heap corruption failure during the program's processing of global destructors. The authors of that...

Yes, it's that time of year again, time for the annual Microsoft Company Meeting, and therefore time for another of Raymond's reminiscences about meetings past. (If you want a report on the meeting itself, I'm sure Mini-Microsoft will oblige. Here's the company meeting preview.) Over a decade ago, one of my colleagues informally organized a bik...

Creating an infrastructure for managing the content you wish you had doesn't actually create that content. Another possible response to the crisis management issue I considered yesterday is to say "Okay, we need to have an official Company X Breaking News site so that people who are looking for an official response to some hot topic can find...

Last year, Weekend America (co-hosted by former Seattleite Bill Radke—we miss you, Bill!) did a story on the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, which calls itself PLOrk. It's an interesting experiment, but computer music doesn't really move me. It's not the computer-ness that bugs me (I was fascinated by music played on Gameboys, after all) but ...

Whenever there is a coordination problem, somebody says, "Hey, let's create a process." Now you have two coordination problems. I see this over and over, and paradoxically the people who create a process for managing a coordinating problem come off looking like proactive problem-solvers who get ahead of the problem. They're the go-getters, the peo...