The Old New Thing

April 2010 - The Old New Thing

Welcome to Taiwan's premier English-only nightclub

April 30, 2010 Apr 30, 2010 04/30/10
Raymond Chen
One 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. My friend didn't have any problems with this rule, but many of the ...

If it's not yours, then don't mess with it without permission from the owner

April 30, 2010 Apr 30, 2010 04/30/10
Raymond Chen
It'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. If you want to ride Jimmy's bike, then you need to have Jimmy's permission. Even...

A short puzzle about heap expansion

April 29, 2010 Apr 29, 2010 04/29/10
Raymond Chen
At 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. And then when my program makes a large allocation, it allocates a new segment instead of reusing ...

He bought the whole seat, but we only needed the edge

April 27, 2010 Apr 27, 2010 04/27/10
Raymond Chen
After 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. A typical morale event might be going to see a baseball game, ...

Why doesn't TryEnterCriticalSection try harder?

April 26, 2010 Apr 26, 2010 04/26/10
Raymond Chen
Bart wants to know why the 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." This second condition is a non-...