Showing results for February 2010 - The Old New Thing

Oscar Night is a few weeks away, but when you settle in to watch the show with your bowl of popcorn, please be aware that inhaling deeply from the fumes of a freshly-opened bag of microwave popcorn is not the greatest decision you can make from a health standpoint. (Then again, you probably ought to reconsider eating microwave popcorn in the first ...

We saw fibers a long time ago when I looked at how you can use fibers as a form of coroutines to simplify the writing of enumerators. A fiber is a handy tool, but it's a tool with very sharp edges. Since fibers are promiscuous with threads, you have to be careful when running code that cares about what thread it is running on, because that code ...

Wow, it's been a long time since my last rant against food products that are offenses against nature. Today's rant is against Bagel-fuls, a product which Kraft launched in April 2008. Bagel-fuls (note the hyphen and the lowercase "f") are a dense, doughy material formed into a log shape, with a cream cheese filling. Think of them as Twinkies, ...

What happens to the fibers which ran on a thread when the thread exits? Are all the fibers destroyed? No, only the currently-executing fiber is destroyed. Fibers running on other threads and fibers which are not running on any thread at all are not affected. Fibers do not have thread affinity (when not running), and they do not remember what thre...

Be careful not to confuse the two. Since we're sharing: During a conversation in German, I talked about seeing Unfall (accident) instead of Abfall (garbage) on the street. To my credit, I immediately corrected my error. To my discredit, the error was made at the state finals of a German language contest.

Some time ago, Michael Kaplan asked (and answered), How the @#%&*! does choose to sort it all out? One detail in his answer is that the sorting algorithm used by is basically , with special treatment for the left square bracket U+005B. Why is the left square bracket so special? It goes back to the message (which is in turn used by , , , a...

As I noted some time ago, one of the most important lessons I learned from Systemantics is Le Chatelier's Principle for complex systems which states, "Every complex system resists its proper functioning." At Microsoft, there are processes galore. For example, when a server is taken down for planned maintenance, you can expect a series of messages...

On Slate, Michael Agger expounds on increasing pressure for people to provide pictures of themselves online. I've managed to resist so far. That article also tipped me off to a phenomenon I didn't even know had a name: MySpace angles.

SuperBK asks, "What's the proper way to add keyboard support to a dialog box?" There are many options available to you. The most traditional way is to pick them off in the dialog loop, either hard-coding the keys in code or putting them into resources by moving them to an accelerator resource. Moving them to an accelerator resource is a good ide...

I was in the grocery store, and there was a sign advertising a new product. Delight in a cup Your favorite XYZ Ice Cream Now in convenient single-serve cups. I took a look at the cup. Seemed kind of big for a single serving. I picked one up to read the nutritional information. Servings per container: 2