Showing archive results for 2007

It's the season where people with fruit trees in their yard are drowning in fresh fruit, be they pears, apples, plums, whatever. It's not long before you find yourself desperately looking for people to give it away to, having pretty much run out of things you can make plums into. This is where Community Fruit Tree Harvest steps in. (Coverage in ...

Let me get this out of the way up front: Creating a thread from is not recommended. The discussion here has to do with explaining the behavior you may observe if you violate this advice. Commenter Pete points out that "according to Usenet" creating a thread in is supposed to deadlock, but that's not what he saw. All he saw was that the thread ...

Undeterred by his failure to win a Senate seat last year, Mike Goodspaceguy Nelson once again ran for King County Council. I can't bring myself to listen to his appearance on the local public radio station (fortunately, he wasn't running in my district). You can read his and opponent Dow Constantine's candidate statements on the King County Ele...

One of my many favorite Dilbert cartoons is also one of the earlier ones. It's the first strip reprinted in this article. It may not actually have happened, but I was told that that one project many years ago replaced its lead manager. While noteworthy, this sort of thing happens often enough that people take it in stride. What put it into a high...

Earlier this month, there were no muffins to be found anywhere on Microsoft campus. Somebody stole the Muffin Truck!

Here's a question that came in from a customer (paraphrased): Hello, we are developing an ASP.NET application and are running into problems with the pop-up blocker introduced in Windows XP Service Pack 2. Where can we get a full description of the rules that control whether a pop-up will be blocked so we can make sure our pop-ups are let...

I have no idea who they are (since I can't read Japanese), but hatena appears to be some sort of Japanese social bookmarking site, and I'll often find hits from them in my referrer logs. One of the members found a newly-issued Japanese translation of my book, which opens up a whole new audience to my obnoxious personality. Stumbling across the J...

If you leave your computer unattended and logged in, especially if you work on the security team, you may come back to your office to find that somebody used your computer to sent email out to the entire team with the subject line FMLA. FMLA stands for "Fire my lame anterior" (except with another word for anterior). The implication is that somebo...

Last year, a spectacular crash of a $1 million Ferrari left a lot of questions unanswered. Who were those mysterious men who picked up Eriksson? How did a fully loaded automatic pistol get under the seat of a person who stopped to help? Why exactly does the San Gabriel Valley Transit Authority have an anti-terrorism unit? And who is this mysteriou...

Here's a question that floated past some time ago: In my code, I have multiple objects that want to talk to the same handle (via ). Each time I create an object, I use to increment the reference count on the handle. That way, when each object calls , only the last one actually closes the handle. However, when I run the code, I find as soon as t...