March 31, 2010Mar 31, 201003/31/10It’s that time again: Sending some link love to my colleagues.
Names and file system filters. Even if you aren’t interested in file system filters (and you probably aren’t), the discussion of names is very interesting, particularly in light of the confusion over hard links and the difference between a file and its names.
March 31, 2010Mar 31, 201003/31/10The phrase URL encoding appears to mean different
things to different people.
First,
Tim Berners-Lee says
that URLs are encoded by using %xx to
encode “dangerous” characters, or to suppress
the special meaning that would normally be assigned
to characters such as / or ?.
March 30, 2010Mar 30, 201003/30/10Some time ago, MSN Careers listed Boil the ocean as a workplace phrase you should learn. Thankfully, the phrase (meaning “to attempt something impossibly ambitious”) is not currently in wide use in Microspeak. However, a friend of mine who works in another industry tells me that it is not only very much alive in his line of work,
March 29, 2010Mar 29, 201003/29/10I use Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Wikipedia entry as a yardstick for other Wikipedia entries. At the time I’m writing this blog entry, her Wikipedia article is 1600 words long. So 1600 words is how many words Wikipedia assigns to the 20th most powerful woman (and the most powerful female lawyer) in the world.
March 29, 2010Mar 29, 201003/29/10nick_journals demonstrates some confusion about names in source code and their relationship to runtime behavior.
A topic I am particularly interested in is the naming of controls, how it works…
Every control gets a name from a developer…via the IDE (e.g btnOK)
When using this function: GetWindowLong(handle,GWL_ID) it doesn’t return the name itself but mostly a number or nothing.
March 26, 2010Mar 26, 201003/26/10We saw last time that the WaitForInputIdle function waits only once for a process to go input idle. Even if the process later stops processing messages, WaitForInputIdle will return immediately and say, “Yeah, he’s idle.”
The way a process is determined to be input idle is that it is waiting for user input when there is none.
March 25, 2010Mar 25, 201003/25/10The WaitForInputIdle function waits for a process to finish its initialization, which is determined when it reaches a state where it is just sitting around waiting for messages.
The documentation for WaitForInputIdle doesn’t even get around to the initialization part until the Remarks section.
March 24, 2010Mar 24, 201003/24/10As we all know, users don’t read error messages.
And, sad to say, this behavior extends to the group of people
you would think pay the most attention to error messages,
namely, programmers, who are the people who cause your computer to
display the error messages!
March 23, 2010Mar 23, 201003/23/10You may have noticed that it takes longer to reject an invalid password than to accept a valid one. There are a few reasons for this.
First of all, it simply takes longer to confirm that a password is invalid.
Your local computer retains a password cache.
March 22, 2010Mar 22, 201003/22/10Languages borrow from each other all the time. English has historically been a happy perpetrator of word-theft, but in recent decades, it has been serving as the source for a lot of theft, too. What I find particularly interesting, though, is when a word is borrowed and given a meaning in its new language different from its meaning in the source language.
