Showing archive results for 2007

Another installment in Raymond's short reviews of SIFF movies he's seen recently. Death at a Funeral: The family funeral gets off to a bad start when the funeral home delivers the wrong body, and it's the only mishap that actually gets fixed without further incident. Everything else goes horribly wrong, and then when you thought it couldn't get ...

Back in Windows 95, there was an elusive heap corruption bug in the graphics engine, and after a lot of analysis, the graphics folks were convinced that the corruption was coming from outside their component, and they had a pretty good idea who the corruptor was, but they needed proof. One of the standard techniques of narrowing down the sour...

It turns out that the replacement movie wasn't any of the ones I listed. Instead, I decided to see In the Shadow of the Moon, a mid-week performance in Seattle. Since it was also a fantastically warm sunny day, traffic into Seattle was a nightmare. As the bus crawled along the highway, I had to do some mental calculations. I'm definitely going t...

Some time ago I received a message that described a situation that was "based on a reality-based scenario." Wow, how many layers away from reality can you get? It wasn't a real scenario. It wasn't a reality-based scenario. It was based on a reality-based scenario. Then again, I'm just adding to the problem. I'm writing a message about a situat...

Strange what sorts of things need to be spelled out explicitly nowadays. You know you're in trouble when your employee training includes a discussion of company policy regarding employees making inappropriate comments or questions about underwear.

New in Visual C++ 2005 is the ability to specify a manifest dependency via a directive. This greatly simplifies using version 6 of the shell common controls. You just have to drop the line into your program and the linker will do the rest. Note that the processor architecture is hard-coded into the above directive, which means that if ...

One of my friends is involved with Science on Tap, a free, informal monthly get-together in the Seattle area covering science topics for the general public. (Recent coverage in the Seattle-PI.) The topic for July 30th is "The three things you need to know about tsunamis", and a title like that pretty much sells itself.

I just made up that term now because I needed a word to describe the situation where some manager is put in charge of a feature but is not given a staff to implement that feature. This happens more often than you might think, since there are many features that are "horizontal", i.e., features which affect all teams throughout the project. So-called...

On Mark Rosenfelder's Zompist web site I found a series of cultural guides named How to tell if you're ‹nationality›. All of the entries are simultaneously funny and insightful, such as this one from Turkey: A company can fire just about anybody it wants. But it will also hire anybody. For some reason, my favorite is this one fro...

Solving this next problem should be a snap with your nascent psychic powers: I'm trying use to load a resource string with one insertion in it, and this doesn't work for some reason. The string is "Blah blah blah %1. Blah blah blah." The call to fails, and returns . What am I doing wrong? Hint: Take a closer look at the parameter . Hint&...