Some time ago, somebody clicked the "Contact me" link in the navigation bar, and despite the warnings, asked a technical question. I responded, "If you have a question you can post it to the suggestion box." The reply: Please, don't use a bot which pretends to be you to answer e-mails. Especially such a poorly-designed one. Maybe those people we...
Steve Makofsky found this article on how you can assemble a 10-day survival pack to keep in your car for just $25. Possible Christmas gift idea? Who knows. Don't forget the duct tape.
For good or ill, email is the most heavily used communication system at Microsoft, so much so that most people at Microsoft are known by their email addresses, sometimes more so than by their legal names! For example, most everybody at Microsoft knows Stephen Toulouse by his email address, "stepto" (pronounced as if it were spelled "steptoe"). No...
Todd Gallagher answers the weird sports questions you always wondered but knew were too stupid even to ask. Think of it as the sports version of Mythbusters. Well, he sort of gives away the answer to the last question in the title of his book, Andy Roddick Beat Me with a Frying Pan. The stories behind how he set about finding the answers to ...
Although the theoretical maximum file size on NTFS is 264−1 clusters, the current implementation of the NTFS driver supports files up to "only" 16TB minus 64KB. (In other words, the disk format supports files up to 264−1 clusters, but the current drivers won't go above 16TB−64KB.) Back in 2002, in order to verify that the driver...
Back in 16-bit Windows, MS-DOS cast a long and dark shadow. The really ugly low-level munging was very much in the MS-DOS spirit. You opened files by setting up registers and issuing an , just like in MS-DOS. Although the interrupt went to Windows instead, Windows maintained the MS-DOS calling convention. Process startup followed the same "real me...
Hotkeys involving the Windows logo key are reserved by the system. New ones are added over time. For example, Windows 98 added Win+D to show the desktop. Windows 2000 added Win+U to call up the Utility Manager. Windows XP added Win+B to move keyboard focus to the taskbar notification area. And a whole bunch of new hotkeys w...
A second installment in a very sporadic series titled The first day at Microsoft, relating stories of funny things that happened on people's first days at Microsoft. Today, we hear from Employee Y: One of the things you have to do on your first day is get your photo taken for your identification badge, and I waited in line with the droves ...
You can use the message with the flag to indicate that the message number you passed is an error code and that the message should be looked up in the system message table. This is a specific case of the more general case where you are not in control of the message, and when you are not in control of the message, you had better pass the flag. ...
One evening, I parked pointing downhill and like the book says, I turned my wheels to the right before parking. But I turned it a bit too far, because when I returned to the car and inserted the key into the ignition, the key wouldn't turn. The wrong thing to do is to force the key until it breaks. Here's the right thing to do: Take the steerin...
