Showing results for June 2010 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Real-time priority is really dangerous. It's higher priority than nearly everything else. It's higher priority than mouse input, keyboard input, and the disk cache. If you foolishly set the priority class of a CPU-intensive program to real-time, it will suck up your entire processor, leaving no cycles for anything else. In particular, since not ...

Some years ago (in a project far, far away) I received a piece of email from a member of the release management team asking me if a particular issue met the escrow reset bug bar or not, as it applied to an upcoming pre-RTM release. I asked, "What is the current escrow reset bar?" I thought this was a fair question. After all, in order to state w...

As they say, "piss or get off the pot."

The 10th European Conference on Computer Supported Co-operative Work was held in Limerick, Ireland, and as you'd expect there were a lot of speakers and breakout sessions and... oh my God, look at those cute ducks!

Commenter Sys64738 points out that Bjarne Stroustrup's Web site says that "Literally everything at Microsoft is built using various flavors of Visual C++ - mostly 6.0 and 7.0 but we do have a few holdouts still using 5.0 :-(" and wonders if it's true. Well, let's see. Visual C++ 6 came out in 1998 and doesn't support the /GS flag, nor does it s...

A customer was having problems with the small icon that appears in the upper left corner of the caption: In my program, I need to enable and disable the Close button programmatically, since the program sometimes goes into a state where I don't want the user to close it. I do this by removing the style when I want to disable the Close button, an...

Some time ago, the NPR news quiz Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me taped a show in Seattle. (They're back in town tonight.) I was fortunate to score tickets to that show, in part because I ordered them nearly a full year before taping. Watching the taping of the show is quite a treat, and I recommend it for any fan of the program. You can watch Peter Sag...

A customer asked the following question: Is there a way to convert an ANSI string directly to UTF-8 string? I have an ANSI string which was converted from Unicode based of the current code page. I need to convert this string to UTF-8. Currently I am converting the string from ANSI to Unicode () and then converting the Unicode to UTF-8 (). Is th...

The Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle is open and free to the public all year around. (And I'm surprised they haven't gotten the heat from the IOC over use of the word Olympic.) One of the works is a giant typewriter eraser. When my friend took her niece (I'm guessing around ten years old at the time) to visit the park, the girl asked, "What's ...

Some time ago, I was asked to help a customer study a set of crashes that had been collected by Windows Error Reporting. (You too can sign up to obtain access to crash data for your application.) The issue itself was the 325th most common crash in the ISV crash database, so fixing it would mean a lot toward improving the overall perceived stability...