Showing results for June 2009 - The Old New Thing

Time for the semi-annual link clearance. And, as always, the obligatory plug for my column in TechNet Magazine:

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 the p...

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. "The bab...

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 until you turn blue. Programs shouldn't care what address they get back from ...

Before field-testing his Heelys for a report in Slate, John Swansburg reads the legal disclaimer and declines it.

The thread that gets the notification is not necessarily the one that got the notification. This is obvious if you think about it, because the thread that got the notification might not even exist any longer when the DLL is unloaded. How can something that doesn't exist send a notification? Even so, many people fail to realize this. You can't ...

Anything in a McDonald's wrapper tastes better, according to children ages 3 to 5. Even something like carrots taste better if you put them in a McDonald's wrapper or cup.

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 submit...

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:

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 idea...