June 2009 | The Old New Thing

2009 mid-year link clearance

Raymond ChenJune 30, 2009Jun 30, 200906/30/09

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

Microspeak: The plan for the plan

Raymond ChenJune 30, 2009Jun 30, 200906/30/09

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

Raymond ChenJune 29, 2009Jun 29, 200906/29/09

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

Raymond ChenJune 29, 2009Jun 29, 200906/29/09

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 ...

John Swansburg deftly declines the fine print disclaimer on his Heelys

Raymond ChenJune 26, 2009Jun 26, 200906/26/09

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

The thread that gets the DLL_PROCESS_DETACH notification is not necessarily the one that got the DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH notification

Raymond ChenJune 26, 2009Jun 26, 200906/26/09

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 ...

News flash: Children are influenced by advertising

Raymond ChenJune 25, 2009Jun 25, 200906/25/09

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...

First, try reading the error message, episode 2: Even programmers see error messages without reading them

Raymond ChenJune 25, 2009Jun 25, 200906/25/09

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

Raymond ChenJune 24, 2009Jun 24, 200906/24/09

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...

Yet another experiment in motivating people to find and fix bugs