Showing archive results for 2009

Some time ago, I ran across the following Freudian typo in a mail thread discussing plans for the project after Milestone 3, commonly abbreviated M3. I'd like to talk with you about your plans for this area after <3. On the US-English keyboard layout, the M and comma keys are adjacent, and a shifted comma is a less-than sign. A simple of...

The utility has been around for a while, but in Windows 7, it gained a little bit more awesome. will analyze your computer's power consumption and report on things like devices that prevent the computer from sleeping, devices which won't suspend, and processes which are increasing your battery drain. Another neat flag is which will repo...

Sean W. requests, via the suggestion box, "an in-depth discussion of the use of the shell's new Desktop Window Manager (Dwm*) functions in Win32." The desktop window manager is not actually part of the shell. It operates at the window manager level. (Notice that DWM is active even when Explorer isn't running.) You probably should have posted your...

A customer reported a crash inside a function we'll call : The title of today's entry gives the answer away. (The title is also an exaggeration, but it's a pun on the saying If you have to ask, you can't afford it.) The last parameter to the function is declared as a : A pointer to a generic pointer. Note that it is not itself a generic poi...

Time overrides the message.

Here's a joke: Question: Where does Bill Gates sit? Answer: Anywhere he wants. (Naturally, substitute the chairman of your company for Bill Gates.) I was told this story by a manager who was preparing a demo for Bill Gates. Bill was going to pay a visit to the offices of one particular project which was still under development and be taken on a...

Another installment in the extremely sporadic series on how to write like Raymond. I use the question mark as an emoticon to indicate befuddlement or confusion. (This is not to be confused with the use of an inverted question mark in Spanish.) Here's an imaginary example: To: Cakes and Cookies Discussion Hi, I'm trying to bake a carrot cake, bu...

Thanks, everybody, for coming out to the Job Fair and attending my talk at Reflections | Projections 2009. Though I should have predicted that scheduling a talk on Saturday morning means that attendance will be somewhat sparse. Thanks to the conference staff with special shout-outs to Kim Vlcek, Bhargav Nookala, Jim Wordelman, and Matt Dordal fo...

Commenter Nick asks whether any though has been given to running applications in a sandbox where they are given access only to their installation directory, My Documents, and a handful of other directories and registry keys. "I feel that this would seriously prevent viruses/spyware from being as effective, and apps would not be able to dump files ...

Today was a long travel day. I left my office at 9:30am to catch the bus from Redmond to downtown Seattle, then took the train to the Tukwila station, then took the shuttle bus to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (because Airport Station doesn't open until later this year), then flew to Chicago O'Hare airport, and then drove to Urbana-Champai...