Some friends came down to visit from Vancouver to take advantage of the favorable exchange rate, and when the topic of lunch arose, one of them suggested Vietnamese sandwiches. "What are Vietnamese sandwiches?" I asked. "Okay, that settles it. We're having Vietnamese sandwiches for lunch," was the response. We went to the generically-named Sea...
I was in a meeting last year where I learned an interesting tidbit of information. One of the people at the meeting was looking at the error reports submitted against Explorer, and the breakdown went something like this. For the purpose of discussion, the number of reports have been normalized into "units", the precise meaning of which is left unsp...
This past weekend I went to the Seattle International Children's Festival to attended a performance of König Drosselbart in German. I was not familiar with the story beforehand, but that's okay. It just makes for a better surprise. The interpretation was very creative. The narrators embodied the characters in the story at times; other time...
Adrian McCarthy ran into a problem where didn't work when called from a handler. You already know how to solve this; you just have to connect the dots. See if you can do it on your own before the answer is revealed.
The unofficial national dish of Portugal is bacalhau, or dried salted cod. The story goes that there is a different bacalhau recipe for every day of the year. There are those who believes that the stories provide a gross underestimate. Bacalhau naturally dates back to the days before refrigeration: Drying and salting served to preserve the fish....
If you wander through MSDN, you may stumble across the function . The correct spelling is mnemonic. Why is the function name misspelled? "It was like that when I got here." The function was originally written for internal use only, and the person who wrote the function spelled the word incorrectly. Still, since it was an internal function, there ...
I have many friends who are enamored of all things cheese, enjoying the subtle nuttiness of a fribble-frabble cheese or the elastic grassiness of an imported Rückwärtspilzhaus. To me, on the other hand, they all just taste like cheese. My friends would probably enjoy this weekend's Seattle Cheese Festival. (Word on the street is that it...
One great way to come up with a dubious security vulnerability is to take something completely innocuous and wrap it inside layer upon layer of obfuscation, and then you proclaim that the obfuscation is the vulnerability. Here's an example based on an actual dubious vulnerability report: Title: Native NT application can shut down computer Descr...
A year and a half ago, I stumbled across the essay Selling Your Life for a Quarter at a Time by Tim Barcz and found it quietly poignant. (Unfortunately, the spammers also found the essay and decided to fill it with garbage links. So much for poignant.) I tried to come up with a catchy tagline for this entry, but nothing worked. Coming up with s...
My colleague David Washington discovered how you can combine the Sidebar slide show gadget with search folders to end up with a slide show that is built out of search results. Pretty neat.
