Showing archive results for 2007

May 4, 2007
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But they're not (puts on sunglasses) going to get away with murder

Raymond Chen

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.

Non-Computer
May 4, 2007
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How my lack of understanding of how processes exit on Windows XP forced a security patch to be recalled

Raymond Chen

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 neve...

Code
May 3, 2007
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Unexpected consequences of self-checkout

Raymond Chen

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 situ...

Non-Computer
May 3, 2007
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Quick overview of how processes exit on Windows XP

Raymond Chen

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 down...

Other
May 2, 2007
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Male perceptions of body image in Taiwan

Raymond Chen

A few years ago, researchers started with "muscle dysmorphia" and body-image perceptions in the United States and Europe and wondered whether the same problems afflict Taiwanese men. Listen for the results. But don't be confused by the chicken meat (肌肉). Sean Cole interviews Taiwanese pop star A-Mèi for her opinion. I rememb...

Non-Computer
May 2, 2007
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The old-fashioned theory on how processes exit

Raymond Chen

Life was simpler back in the old days. Back in the old days, processes were believed to be in control of their threads. You can see this in the "old fashioned" way of exiting a process, namely by exiting all the threads. This method works only if the process knows about all the threads running in it and can get each one to clean up when it's time ...

Code
May 1, 2007
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Microspeak: Operationalize

Raymond Chen

Here are a few citations for the word operationalize. A lot of work lies ahead to operationalize this plan. Provide security guidance and tools to help operationalize security for enterprise environments. I thought it meant "carry out" or "put into effect", and then I saw this sentence: Operationalize the demo (get computers configured, insta...

OtherMicrospeak
Apr 30, 2007
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Everyone should have a house pianist

Raymond Chen

Last 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? I offered the piano in my living room and gave him the key to my house. I came home one...

Non-Computer
Apr 30, 2007
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The default verb is not necessarily "open"

Raymond Chen

If you hunt around the Internet you'll find lots of people† who hard-code the string as the second parameter to the function, indicating that they want to open the document specified as the third parameter. While that's a nice thing to want to do, it might not be the right thing. When the user double-clicks a document, the shell executes ...

Code