Showing archive results for June 2009

My friend ::Wendy:: asks why there is an American English version of Windows but not a British English version. I am not the expert on this subject (Michael Kaplan might be a bit closer), but I can speculate on the reasons for this. This is all conjecture, so who knows how accurate it is. (Actually, most of what I write is conjecture; I just don...

Yesterday, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I receive a telephone call at work. There is that characteristic pause after connecting which tells me that I have probably just been called by a telemarketer. "Hello?" — Hello, I'm Brian George from Liquid Capital Management. Our company founder, Brian Kim, has been working closely with Microsof...

Last year, I wrote about a virus that is responsible for the top six Explorer crashes, by a wide margin. I learned later how the authors of this XYZ Virus operate, and it happens to answer a question posted by commenter SteveL as to why these virus writers are so incompetent that they crash so much. First, the virus authors infect your compu...

Thanks to NPR's Monkey See blog for finding this:

If you have one of those cool swively LCD displays (or if you decided to build your own), you naturally want to tell your video card to display rotated output, so you can take advantage of the portrait orientation. And naturally you would think that calling the and using the field of the structure would do the trick. And then you would find t...

Dodge, parry, thrust. Welcome to the Cardboard Tube Fighting League. (I happened to be in Gasworks Park for a totally unrelated reason and managed to catch the final battle of the Seattle branch's 2008 Tournament.)

If you spend time in kernel mode, you're accustomed to seeing functions with two-letter (or occasionally, three-letter) prefixes that indicate which component they belong to. What does the "Zw" mean? Answer: Nothing. The people who chose the letters wanted to pick something that was unlikely to collide with anything. Perhaps they had a pr...

Like microsoft.com, the question isn't whether blogs.msdn.com site is under attack but rather how bad the attack is right now. There are a number of regular culprits, like , , , but those sites tend to focus on the most recent few articles. A new category of trackback spammer is here: The I'm going to scrape your entire site and create a trackba...

A notice was sent out by the real estate department with the provocative subject line Campus notification — Building 7: Marking Boring Locations. What? Were the people in the real estate department saying that the people who work in Building 7 need to get some new hobbies? Or maybe they were just going to put up markers like you ...

When I met Sara Ford at the 2008 PDC, I got to talk to her author-a-author. I asked her how the book-writing experience was. "I'm never doing that again!" she replied. Yeah, that's pretty much how I feel about it, too. Steve Makofsky agrees. (Though, to be fair, what Sara was not going to do was write a book in three months, as opposed to sw...