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April 30, 2010Apr 30, 201004/30/10One of my friends is fluent in both Mandarin and English. When she lived in Taiwan, she paid a visit to a nightclub whose gimmick was that you had to speak English. The target audience was not foreigners but rather native Taiwanese who learned English as a second language.
April 30, 2010Apr 30, 201004/30/10It’s surprising how many principles of real life also apply to computer programming. For example, one of the rules of thumb for real life is that is that if something doesn’t belong to you, then you shouldn’t mess with it unless you have permission from the owner.
April 29, 2010Apr 29, 201004/29/10At the 2008 PDC, somebody stopped by the Ask the Experts table with a question about the heap manager.
I don’t understand why the heap manager is allocating a new segment. I allocated a bunch of small blocks, then freed nearly all of them.
April 28, 2010Apr 28, 201004/28/10Bart wonders what happens to the dirty contents of a memory-mapped file when an application is terminated abnormally.
From the kernel’s point of view, there isn’t much difference between a normal and an abnormal termination. In fact, the last thing that ExitProcess does is TerminateProcess(GetCurrentProcess(),
April 27, 2010Apr 27, 201004/27/10After the Windows 95 project was released to manufacturing, but before the launch event itself, the team finally had a chance to relax and unwind after many years of hard work. The project manager decided to have a morale event to get everyone together to do something fun.
April 26, 2010Apr 26, 201004/26/10Bart wants to know
why the TryEnterCriticalSection
gives up if the critical
section is busy instead of trying the number of times specified by
the critical section spin count.
Actually, there was another condition on the proposed new behavior:
“but does not release its timeslice
to the OS if it fails to get it while spinning.”
April 23, 2010Apr 23, 201004/23/10I saw a bottle of salad dressing with very strange fine print. The picture on the bottle is of half an avocado. But the fine print on the bottle reads “Does not contain avocados.”
Okay, so the picture on the bottle isn’t a picture of the product.
April 23, 2010Apr 23, 201004/23/10A customer asked for help writing a regular expression that, in the customer’s words, matched the string %1 when it appeared as a standalone word.
Match
No match
%1
%1b
:%1:
x%1
One of the things that people often forget to do when asking a question is to describe the things that they tried and what the results were.
April 22, 2010Apr 22, 201004/22/10When you ask a question, you should also mention what steps you’ve already taken when attempting to solve it on your own.
First of all, it saves the people who decide to help you with your problem from exploring lines of investigation which you’ve already tried (and which you know don’t work).
April 21, 2010Apr 21, 201004/21/10I illustrate this point with an imaginary conversation, inspired by actual ones I’ve seen (and, occasionally, been a frustrated party to).
From: X
I want to do ABC, but I don’t have a DEF. Anybody know of a workaround?
Somebody has an idea:
From: Y
Try mounting this ISO file into a virtual machine and trying the ABC from there.
