October 31, 2008Oct 31, 200810/31/08Hallowe’en is a family affair at Microsoft. It typically starts at around 3 or 4 o’clock, with costumed kids roaming the hallways collecting treats from offices. One year, one of my colleagues decided that the kids deserved more than the usual candy bars and chocolates.
October 31, 2008Oct 31, 200810/31/08Public Service Announcement: Daylight Saving Time ends in most parts of the United States this weekend.
I pointed out some time ago that Win32 and .NET deal with daylight saving time differently. Specifically, Win32 always deals with the time zone you are currently in (even if it’s not the time zone that corresponds to the timestamp you are manipulating),
October 30, 2008Oct 30, 200810/30/08Short stories from the 2008 PDC:
On the bus heading to the attendee party at Universal Studios, I overhear one person advising another on how to put on the band that grants admission to the park: “Be careful not to catch any hair on the glue.
October 30, 2008Oct 30, 200810/30/08I spend a good amount of my time doing source code archaeology,
and one thing that really muddles the historical record is
people who start with a small source code change which turns
into large-scale source code reformatting.
I don’t care how you format your source code.
October 29, 2008Oct 29, 200810/29/08Today is the day of my talk. I’m always a bit nervous before these things, because I’m never sure if what I’m going to present matches up with what people are expecting. Most people who come to my PDC talk don’t know who I am,
October 29, 2008Oct 29, 200810/29/08“I don’t know what happened, but now when I open the Run dialog on my Windows Vista machine by typing Windows+R, there is a shield under the edit box that says This task will be created with administrative privileges. What’s going on?”
October 28, 2008Oct 28, 200810/28/08Typo patrol got off to a very quick start. One of the flyers in the attendee goodie bag is from a company which offers two free months of service to PDC attendees. The first step in obtaining the service is “Just signup and mention the PDC by January 31,
October 28, 2008Oct 28, 200810/28/08When KC told me about a trick she learned to get an area expert to respond to her email, I cautioned her that the trick might backfire:
A friend of mine (let’s call him Bob) happens also to work in the technology industry,
October 27, 2008Oct 27, 200810/27/08Sitting in my hotel room the night before the 2008 PDC, I’m watching the Los Angeles local news, and the field reporter just said, “The police say this is an isolated incident, but it could happen anywhere.”
October 27, 2008Oct 27, 200810/27/08When I wrote about understanding the consequences of WAIT_ABANDONED, I mentioned that one of the possible responses was to try to repair the damage, but some people are suspicious of this approach.
Mind you, I’m suspicious of it, too. Repairing corruption is hard.
