Showing results for February 2009 - Page 2 of 4 - The Old New Thing

When you view the properties of a file and go to the General page, there are some check boxes at the bottom for file attributes. There's one for Read-only and one for Hidden, and then it gets weird. Sometimes you get Archive and sometimes you get an Advanced button. What controls which one you get? It depends on whether there is anything interest...

My colleague Keith Moore (who occasionally comments on this site) shared with me one of his recent triumphs of psychic debugging. First the question: The customer is getting an RST response from IIS and they would like to know why. Here is a fragment from a network capture that illustrates the problem. (Fragment deleted.) The full capture is ava...

I was recently tipped off to yet another Seattle bus tool: One Bus Away, which not only provides real-time bus arrival information for every stop in the Metro system, but does so in a variety of formats. You can use the Web-based interface (which is close to what you can already get from the Tracker Location View), but the real magic is that the ...

There are any number of bits of information you might want to query from the file system, such as the number of files in a directory or the total size of the files in a directory. Why doesn't the file system keep track of these things? Well, of course, one answer is that it certainly couldn't keep track of every possible fragment of information ...

This is sort of an extreme corollary to Don't save anything you can recalculate. Sure, it sounds like such an obvious principle, but many people fail to understand its consequences. Let's look at the principle again. Don't keep track of information you don't need. I remember being asked to look at a customer's program, and one thing that struck...

Four years ago, Troy Kleweno spotted Christine Hsieh on the 308 bus. He saw her twice a day, once in the morning on the way to work, and again in the evening on the way home. His co-workers teased him about the "bus girl" he pined after for six months before he finally said hello. That led to a date, and soon they were a couple. It's only fitti...

(Cultural note: The phrase the mating call of the loser is a term of derision. I used it here to create a more provocative headline even though it's stronger than I really intended, but good writing is bold.) When given a choice between two architectures, some people say that you should give users a checkbox to select which one should be used....

If you are an old geezer, you'll remember supermarionated shows, the most famous of which is Thunderbirds. And if you're not an old geezer, then this amazing spoof by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore will mean nothing to you. (You will also have no idea who Peter Cook and Dudley Moore are.)

The process goes by the name COM Surrogate and the only time you're likely even to notice its existence is when it crashes and you get the message COM Surrogate has stopped working. What is this COM Surrogate and why does it keep crashing? The COM Surrogate is a fancy name for Sacrificial process for a COM object that is run outside of the proce...

Normally, the phrase In order to serve you better means that you're about to get screwed. Imagine my surprise to discover that United has stopped imposing a fuel surcharge for flights between Canada and the United States due to the decrease in fuel prices. But wait, that's only for flights between Canada and the United States. Flights within ...