The Old New Thing

October 2008 - Page 2 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Man, this housing downturn is hitting everyone

October 24, 2008 Oct 24, 2008 10/24/08
Raymond Chen
Consider this house on Mercer Island, which happens to be for sale. Asking price: A shade under $35 million. Five bedrooms, nine bathrooms, over 22 thousand square feet, two swimming pools, space to park a 140-foot yacht, and an interior so opulent you'd be afraid to touch anything. If you were even allowed anywhere near it. But the ...

Sucking the trap frame out of a kernel mode stack trace

October 24, 2008 Oct 24, 2008 10/24/08
Raymond Chen
If you are placed in the unfortunate position of having to debug a user-mode crash from kernel mode, one of the first things you have to do is get back to the exception on the user-mode side so you can see what happened. We saw earlier how you can get symbols for operating system binaries to help you suck the exception pointers out of a user...
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Strange things happen when you let people choose their own name, part 3

October 23, 2008 Oct 23, 2008 10/23/08
Raymond Chen
Although Microsoft employees are internally assigned a cryptic email address by the IT department, the email address used for mail to and from the outside world is open to customization, to some degree. For example, consider an imaginary employee named Christopher Columbus. Christopher might be assigned an email address like chrisco or ...

Strange things happen when you let people choose their own name, part 2

October 22, 2008 Oct 22, 2008 10/22/08
Raymond Chen
I described last time how most parts of your entry in the company address book are closely regulated, but the differentiator is left to the honor system. Here are two and a half more examples of people who decided to do something funny with their bonus text. A message was sent to a mailing list I happen to be a member of, and the sender's ...

Strange things happen when you let people choose their own name, part 1

October 21, 2008 Oct 21, 2008 10/21/08
Raymond Chen
One of the things that happens when you arrive at Microsoft is you are assigned an email account, and the name of that account becomes your identity. The IT department has a set of rules which they follow to arrive at your account name, but you can petition for reconsideration if the result of their algorithm produces something you don't like...

Off-Roading The Old New Thing

October 20, 2008 Oct 20, 2008 10/20/08
Raymond Chen
My friend ::Wendy:: decided that going off topic in the comments to this Web site was so much fun, she didn't want to let the Ground Rules stop her. So she created the Off-Roading The Old New Thing group, where people who get a thrill out of going off topic can do so without running afoul of this Web site's Ground Rules. Have fun, ...

Why can’t you thunk between 32-bit and 64-bit Windows?

October 20, 2008 Oct 20, 2008 10/20/08
Raymond Chen
It was possible to use generic thunks in 16-bit code to allow it to call into 32-bit code. Why can't we do the same thing to allow 32-bit code to call 64-bit code? It's the address space. Both 16-bit and 32-bit Windows lived in a 32-bit linear address space. The terms 16 and 32 refer to the size of the offset relative to the selector...
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The cult of PowerPoint, episode 2

October 17, 2008 Oct 17, 2008 10/17/08
Raymond Chen
PowerPoint is a fine presentation tool, but some people have elevated it to the level of a cult. The most recent member of the PowerPoint cult was a customer who decided to use PowerPoint in an email message. No, I don't mean that the customer attached a bad PowerPoint presentation to the email. I mean that the customer's email was itself a...

Psychic debugging: Why your thread is spending all its time processing meaningless thread timers

October 16, 2008 Oct 16, 2008 10/16/08
Raymond Chen
I was looking at one of those "my program is consuming 100% of the CPU and I don't know why" bugs, and upon closer investigation, the proximate reason the program was consuming 100% CPU was that one of the threads was being bombarded with WM_TIMER messages where the MSG.hWnd is NULL. The program was dispatching them as fast as it could, but ...
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Possessed: A documentary about hoarding

October 15, 2008 Oct 15, 2008 10/15/08
Raymond Chen
I found Possessed, a short documentary on hoarders, fascinating because I teeter on the brink of hoarding myself and have to fight it. Some days I am more successful than others. Notice how coherently the subjects talk about their obsession. They know it's pathological, but they can't stop themselves. I was able to beat my hoarding of ...