Showing results for December 2009 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Commenter denis bider considers accessiblity an altruistic endeavor and suggests that it would be more efficient to outsource accessibility to another company. Sure, why not. Just like in real life, you can hire someone to do your programming taxes for you. If you would rather hire another company to come in and add accessibility support to your ...

Saturating the network with broadcast packets.

Commenter Mike Dunn would like to know why the word Start disappeared from the Start button in Windows Vista. After all, adding the word Start helped new users figure out what they should click first. I don't know but I can guess. To emphasize that these are guesses, I went back in after I wrote them and added all sorts of weasel words. It sor...

Craig's List has a Best of Craig's List, but Facebook doesn't. Well now it does: LameBook (warning: often NSFW). My favorite: Lameonella.

Another in a sporadic series on the format of Win32 resources. Here's a question from a customer: I'm noticing some strange behavior: When I call then on an embedded bitmap, the data being returned by is not a properly formatted bitmap. The data is missing the , but the rest of the file is there. also states that the bitmap resource is 14 byt...

Not Always Right is a collection of brief stories told by people in customer service. One of my favorites is from somebody who lives on Catalina Island and had to answer the question, "What time does the island close?" Runners-up: (I've left off the punch lines so as not to spoil the surprise.) The stories have been collected into a book, The...

The great thing about parameter validation is that there are people who say that only idiots would have it, and other people who say that only idiots wouldn't. Back in the old days, Windows didn't do parameter validation. If you called a function with an invalid window handle, your application crashed. If you called a function with an invalid poin...

Some time ago, I summarized the overlay icons that come with Windows. There have been some changes in Windows 7, so I figured it'd be worth coming up with a new list. A private item is an item where the only user account with access is you.¹ You create one of these, for example, by going to the sharing wizard and saying Share with: No...

When doing high-performance computing, you need to worry about the CPU cache line size in order to avoid issues like false sharing. But how can you determine the processor's cache size? The function will give you characteristics of the logical processors in use by the system. You can walk the returned by the function looking for entries of type...

On an internal discussion group, somebody decided to quote one of my blog entries. Jim Medding was amused by my response: Bloggers are just idiots with a Web site. (My blog was dug up in order to refute a claim, even though the blog entry applied to a situation different from the one under discussion.)