February 29, 2008Feb 29, 200802/29/08Every year, I put together a little pocket guide to the Seattle Symphony subscription season for my symphony friends to help them decide which ticket package they want. As before, you might find it helpful, you might not, but here it is anyway.
February 29, 2008Feb 29, 200802/29/08A common mistake I see is people confusing message tables
with string resources.
This basically shows up in one place:
FormatMessage.
The folks who were designing Win32
decided that plain string resources weren’t fancy enough,
so they invented message tables, which is just another way
of storing strings in resources.
February 28, 2008Feb 28, 200802/28/08It’s not just orange juice for breakfast any more. Soft drinks are making inroads into the world traditionally dominated by milk, orange juice, coffee, and tea. According to the article, over one in seven people order a soft drink to accompany their breakfast.
February 28, 2008Feb 28, 200802/28/08On Windows NT-based operating systems, process and thread IDs happen always to be a multiple of four. Is this just a coincidence?
Yes, it’s just a coincidence, and you shouldn’t rely on it since it is not part of the programming contract.
February 27, 2008Feb 27, 200802/27/08Some months ago, I wanted to make a reservation at my favorite Seattle restaurant for special occasions: the Asteroid Cafe. (Asteroid trivia: Their original Wallingford location was so small, you had to go into the kitchen to use the rest room.
February 27, 2008Feb 27, 200802/27/08One of the predefined security access masks is
STANDARD_RIGHTS_REQUIRED.
You see it used in defining the _ALL_ACCESS masks for
various objects.
Here are just a few examples:
#define PROCESS_ALL_ACCESS (STANDARD_RIGHTS_REQUIRED | SYNCHRONIZE | \
0xFFF)
#define EVENT_ALL_ACCESS (STANDARD_RIGHTS_REQUIRED|SYNCHRONIZE|0x3)
#define FILE_ALL_ACCESS (STANDARD_RIGHTS_REQUIRED | SYNCHRONIZE | 0x1FF)
The STANDARD_RIGHTS_REQUIRED mask is meant to be used
when defining access masks for object types.
February 26, 2008Feb 26, 200802/26/08The organizers of TechDays 2008 Portugal have decided to lower their standards and invite me to speak at their conference in Lisbon, which by an amazing coincidence takes place during the same week as my appearance at XV Semana Informática do Instituto Superior Técnico (though fortunately not the same day).
February 26, 2008Feb 26, 200802/26/08Some time ago, Larry Osterman wrote about the unofficial game of Last Checkin Chicken, wherein teams “compete” to avoid being the one responsible for the last change to a product. The competition is purely virtual; nobody really keeps score, and the “winner”
February 25, 2008Feb 25, 200802/25/08Recently-unearthed documents reveal that back in the 1950’s, France proposed merging with United Kingdom into a single country or at least joining the Commonwealth. Apparently, Churchill proposed a similar alliance in the 1940. It too was rejected. (Other coverage. There’s a secret joke in that article: Check out the URL.)
Apparently,
February 25, 2008Feb 25, 200802/25/08Why doesn’t Microsoft bundle third-party programs?
Yes, it has been done in the past, but the results were hardly a slam dunk success.
Who ports the software to 64-bit Windows? (Answer: Me, personally. I spent a good chunk of the year 2000 porting millions of lines of code to 64-bit Windows.
