Showing archive results for 2008

It's great to think about all the things that can go wrong but you also have to think about the situations that could lead to those bad things. In particular, you have to recognize when you are trying to avoid a bug that is ultimately outside your component and which you can't fix anyway. For example, consider this multithreaded race condition: ...

Hallowe'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. Even though he is Caucasian, he went to the local Asian foods market and stoc...

Public 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 mani...

Short stories from the 2008 PDC: Bonus chatter added 9am:

I 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. It's your source code. And your team might decide to change styles at some...

Today 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, so they aren't expecting me to toss out a few catch phrases, use my psychic powers, and tell stories about how a bug in a...

"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?" One my colleagues used psychic powers to solve this problem: "I imagine that you manually killed Explorer, and t...

Typo 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, 2008." Okay, just hang on while I fire up my time machine. Bonus grammar typo: signup is ...

When 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, and the manager for the part of the project he worked on was, to put it nicely, "in the wrong line of work." No matter how m...

Sitting 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."