The Old New Thing

June 2009 - The Old New Thing

2009 mid-year link clearance

June 30, 2009 Jun 30, 2009 06/30/09
Raymond Chen
Time for the semi-annual link clearance. How to rotate your Samsung Syncmaster 245BW into portrait mode. Watching the global cycle of airline traffic through the day. [via] Glowing Cities Under a Nighttime Sky, a time-lapse video shot out the window of a commercial airline. [via] The least-...

Microspeak: The plan for the plan

June 30, 2009 Jun 30, 2009 06/30/09
Raymond Chen
I ran across an old document that contained a phrase I hadn't heard before: The Plan for the Plan for the XYZ Team Summary XYZ is at ZBB and we are now at a recall class only bug bar until RTM. The team has also started working on a plan for a plan to address the requests made from the XYZ Leadership Team several months ago. Details of ...

Learning to lie: Early forays

June 29, 2009 Jun 29, 2009 06/29/09
Raymond Chen
Some time ago, I was visiting a family with small children, and I found the two-year-old middle child with a marker in her hand suspiciously close to some fresh marks on the living room couch. The following conversation ensued: "Who drew on the couch?" — My older sister. "Your older sister isn't home." — The baby. "...

If you want to consume all the virtual address space, well, then go ahead and consume it, you don’t need my help

June 29, 2009 Jun 29, 2009 06/29/09
Raymond Chen
Commenter Matthew Chaboud asks if there's an easy way to consume all the virtual address space below 4GB, short of, well, actually allocating it. "It seems like there should be a cleaner way to do this." If you want to consume all the virtual address space, then call VirtualAlloc until you turn blue. Programs shouldn't care what address ...
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The thread that gets the DLL_PROCESS_DETACH notification is not necessarily the one that got the DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH notification

June 26, 2009 Jun 26, 2009 06/26/09
Raymond Chen
The thread that gets the DLL_PROCESS_DETACH notification is not necessarily the one that got the DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH notification. This is obvious if you think about it, because the thread that got the DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH notification might not even exist any longer when the DLL is unloaded. How can something that doesn't exist send a ...
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First, try reading the error message, episode 2: Even programmers see error messages without reading them

June 25, 2009 Jun 25, 2009 06/25/09
Raymond Chen
I will occasionally note that users don't read error messages; they just click Cancel. And the phenomenon isn't just restricted to naïve users. Even programmers ignore error messages. All they see is "Blah blah blah an error occurred." For example, there's this message that appeared on a peer-to-peer discussion group: I tried to ...

Spam trackback attack week 3 statistics

June 24, 2009 Jun 24, 2009 06/24/09
Raymond Chen
The people who run this site think they have a handle on the trackback spam attack that raged for three and a half weeks. All the bad IP addresses have been blocked, and hopefully we didn't lose any babies with the bathwater. Here are the statistics for the final wave: Site From To Count Rate (pings/hr) www....

Yet another experiment in motivating people to find and fix bugs

June 24, 2009 Jun 24, 2009 06/24/09
Raymond Chen
Everybody has probably heard about some project where management decided to motivate testers and programmers by rewarding testers for finding bugs and programmers for fixing them. In the absence of high ethical standards, this can devolve into the situation known to Dilbert fans as I'm gonna write me a new minivan. I experimented with this...