2008 Q3 link clearance: Microsoft blogger edition

Raymond Chen

It’s that time again: Sending some link love to my colleagues.

• James O’Neill tells a story about a very strange design for an award from the British Safety Council.
• Microspotting interviews Dare Obasanjo. He handles those “Hello, I am a Nigerian government official, and I need your help” messages differently from you and me.
• The Security Vulnerability Research & Defense blog contains “bonus information” about security bulletins. Think of it as the director’s commentary track.
• Yes, we know things are rainy in Seattle, but the mountain’s name is pronounced ray-NEER even though it does look like something else.
• John Guin confirms: “All the stories you hear about tech support calls are true. All of them.”
• Eric Lippert reminds us that string hashes are not for cryptographic purposes.
• Mark Brown’s Virtual Earth Blog pays a visit to the people who fly the UltraCam, that thing that gets those high resolution aerial images. See the software they use to control the camera, and if you ask nicely, they might even take you for a ride. Mark also has a nice picture of the UltraCam itself.
• On The Debugging Toolbox, Roberto Farah takes a break from cooking up PowerDbg scripts to show some fancy tricks you can play with the dv command. Plenty of other debugging tips on that site, so check it out. Doug Stewart has his own collection of links to debugging resources.
• Michael Howard goes into more detail about what sort of heap corruption is treated as fatal if you set HeapEnableTerminationOnCorruption. Of course, this list may change as new types of corruption-detection are added, but it’s a start.
• Terry Zink blogs about the world of email spam, including a massive 18-part series on backscatter.
• Dennis Middleton, the self-proclaimed NTFS Doctor, explains why the Size on disk and Used space appear to disagree.
• The Environment folks have their own blog for computing and the environment, titled Software Enabled Earth. Nick Mayhew calls out some of his favorite parts.
• The Live Search Webmaster Center Blog introduces you to the basics of seeing how Live Search crawls your site and what steps you can take to help it do a better job.
• James Whittaker tackles the thorny question, If Microsoft is so good at testing, why does your software suck?
• Better than epoxy: Chris Chalmers’s e-Discovery covers new group policies to give administrators better control over USB thumb drives.
• Adrian Vinca has shared a personal programming project written just to learn about XNA, but it sounds useful in its own right: Zune Clock 1.5. (Earlier versions also available.)
• Alfred Thompson helps us find old Office commands on the new ribbon.
• Tom Mertens points to an instructional video showing how to write your own Windows Live Messenger agent. Now I’m tempted to write one, even though I have nothing for my agent to do… (Smarter people than me have created a .)
• The Office Natural Language Team explain how you can remove a word from Office’s speller dictionary. Earlier this year, there was also an article in the local newspaper on the day-to-day decisions by the people who maintain the list of words in the spell-check dictionary. Bonus reading: A run-down of the process, and reader feedback.
• Scott Hanselman shares the history of the Windows Template Library (WTL).
• Joseph Conway explains what the WINSXS directory is, and why it’s so huge.
• If you aren’t subscribed to the Engineering Windows 7 blog, then stop right now and go subscribe. I’ll wait.

  
  Okay, you’re back. There’s bucketloads of awesome stuff in there, in particular Ryan Haveson’s second follow-up on high DPI points out why vectors don’t solve everything.

[Raymond is currently away; this message was pre-recorded.]

Raymond Chen

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