The Old New Thing

January 2009 - The Old New Thing

The problem with The Month Where Everyone Focuses on Improving Documentation is that most people are terrible technical writers

January 30, 2009 Jan 30, 2009 01/30/09
Raymond Chen
Why not have a month where everybody focuses on improving documentation like that month a few years ago where everybody focused on security? Well, part of it is that most people suck at technical writing. The technical part, maybe, but the writing almost definitely not. Writing is hard (as I've learned firsthand), and technical writing is a...

A process shutdown puzzle

January 29, 2009 Jan 29, 2009 01/29/09
Raymond Chen
In honor of National Puzzle Day, I leave you today with a puzzle based on an actual customer problem. Part One: The customer explains the problem. We have this DLL, and during its startup, it creates a thread with the following thread procedure: DWORD CALLBACK ThreadFunction(void *) { HANDLE HandleArray[2]; HandleArray[0] = ...

There’s camping, and then there’s luxury camping, and then there’s ridiculous luxury camping

January 27, 2009 Jan 27, 2009 01/27/09
Raymond Chen
Back in 2002, I read an article about luxury camping in the Wall Street Journal, and it struck me as kind of missing the point of camping. For campers too busy to shop for marshmallows, one place stocks a s'mores kit -- skewers included -- in its gourmet general store. Another provides blow dryers, putting an end to "river hair." When ...

Why can’t I see all of the 4GB of RAM in my machine?, redux

January 27, 2009 Jan 27, 2009 01/27/09
Raymond Chen
Phil Taylor gives another few reasons why machine with 4GB of RAM doesn't show up as such. (Here's my earlier posting on this subject, for reference.) These articles about possible reasons for memory not showing up are not intended to be comprehensive. It is entirely possible that the problem you are experiencing is not one described ...

Why can’t you apply ACLs to registry values?

January 23, 2009 Jan 23, 2009 01/23/09
Raymond Chen
Someone wondered why you can't apply ACLs to individual registry values, only to the containing keys. You already know enough to answer this question; you just have to put the pieces together. In order for a kernel object to be ACL-able, you need to be able to create a handle to it, since it is the act of creating the handle that ...