Showing archive results for 2009

The original IBM PC came with 16KB of memory. That's not a lot of space in which to squeeze an operating system, especially since you had to leave enough memory for the user to actually get work done. A product of its time, the MS-DOS kernel is written entirely in assembly language, pretty much standard procedure for programs of the era. It also...

Back in 2002, I read an article about luxury camping in the Wall Street Journal, and it struck me as kind of missing the point of camping. For campers too busy to shop for marshmallows, one place stocks a s'mores kit -- skewers included -- in its gourmet general store. Another provides blow dryers, putting an end to "river hair." When Karen S...

Phil Taylor gives another few reasons why machine with 4GB of RAM doesn't show up as such. (Here's my earlier posting on this subject, for reference.) These articles about possible reasons for memory not showing up are not intended to be comprehensive. It is entirely possible that the problem you are experiencing is not one described here.

An insane 1.4-gigapixel image of Obama's inaugural address. All it needs is a guy in the audience dressed like Waldo.

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there was a research team inside Microsoft who was working on alternate models for handling input. I don't know what eventually came of that project, and I don't even remember the details of the meeting, but I do remember the punch line, so I'm just going to make up the rest. The research project broke up ...

Someone wondered why you can't apply ACLs to individual registry values, only to the containing keys. You already know enough to answer this question; you just have to put the pieces together. In order for a kernel object to be ACL-able, you need to be able to create a handle to it, since it is the act of creating the handle that performs the...

This is another manifestation of the missing marshaller problem. IContextMenu *pcm; HRESULT hr = psf->GetUIObjectOf(hwnd, 1, &pidl, IID_IContextMenu, NULL, &pcm); // fails with REGDB_E_IIDNOTREG The IContextMenu interface does not have a proxy/stub factory (as of this writing). Recall that shell objects, as a rule, a...

This is another example of the dubious security vulnerability known as wrapping a simple idea inside layers of obfuscation and then thinking that somehow the obfuscation is the source of the problem. First of all, consider this: Suppose a program calls one of its own functions but gets the calling convention wrong and ends up corrupting its sta...

I find it surprising how often this happens. A customer liaison will send a question to a mailing list like this: From: X To: Gizmo Discussion Hi, everybody. My customer is using the Gizmo Toolkit and wants to frob a gizmo without first registering as a frobber. They created the gizmo with , passing all the default flags, and then they call ...

Only a Game interviews Harvey Pack [real], author of May the Horse Be With You, a collection of stories about horse racing. I don't really care much about horse racing, but I do love a good story, and Harvey Pack has a bazillion good stories.