Showing archive results for 2009

A few years ago, there was a question on a mailing list for topic X, but the question was about unrelated topic Y. The question was nevertheless answered by the people on the topic X mailing list out of the kindness of their hearts (above and beyond the heart-sourced kindness that powers most mailing lists in the first place). I poin...

Commenter Francisco Moraes wonders whether there is a supported way of getting the command line of another process. Although there are certainly unsupported ways of doing it or ways that work with the assistance of a debugger, there's nothing that is supported for programmatic access to another process's command line, at least nothing provided b...

This weekend is the annual Chilly Hilly bike ride, an early wake-up call to bicyclists in the Seattle area to get their act together and hit the road. Last year, I joined my 2999 closest friends up and down the hills of Bainbridge Island. Unfortunately, the hills had grown taller in the two years since my last ride. There was an announceme...

This is the blog entry that acted as the inspiration for the last topic in my 200 PDC talk. When somebody launches a second copy of your single-instance program, you usually want the second copy to send its command line to the first instance (and deal with the current directory somehow), and then you want the first instance to come to the foreg...

When you view the properties of a file and go to the General page, there are some check boxes at the bottom for file attributes. There's one for Read-only and one for Hidden, and then it gets weird. Sometimes you get Archive and sometimes you get an Advanced button. What controls which one you get? It depends on whether there is anything interest...

My colleague Keith Moore (who occasionally comments on this site) shared with me one of his recent triumphs of psychic debugging. First the question: The customer is getting an RST response from IIS and they would like to know why. Here is a fragment from a network capture that illustrates the problem. (Fragment deleted.) The full capture is ava...

I was recently tipped off to yet another Seattle bus tool: One Bus Away, which not only provides real-time bus arrival information for every stop in the Metro system, but does so in a variety of formats. You can use the Web-based interface (which is close to what you can already get from the Tracker Location View), but the real magic is that the ...

There are any number of bits of information you might want to query from the file system, such as the number of files in a directory or the total size of the files in a directory. Why doesn't the file system keep track of these things? Well, of course, one answer is that it certainly couldn't keep track of every possible fragment of information ...

This is sort of an extreme corollary to Don't save anything you can recalculate. Sure, it sounds like such an obvious principle, but many people fail to understand its consequences. Let's look at the principle again. Don't keep track of information you don't need. I remember being asked to look at a customer's program, and one thing that struck...

Four years ago, Troy Kleweno spotted Christine Hsieh on the 308 bus. He saw her twice a day, once in the morning on the way to work, and again in the evening on the way home. His co-workers teased him about the "bus girl" he pined after for six months before he finally said hello. That led to a date, and soon they were a couple. It's only fitti...