The Old New Thing

September 2010 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Microspeak: Sats

September 14, 2010 Sep 14, 2010 09/14/10
Raymond Chen
I introduced this Microspeak last year as part of a general entry about management-speak, but I'm giving it its own entry because it deserves some attention on its own. I just want to have creative control over how my audience can interact with me without resorting to complex hacking in a way that is easy to explain but ups our blogging ...

Ha ha, the speaker gift is a speaker, get it?

September 13, 2010 Sep 13, 2010 09/13/10
Raymond Chen
As a thank-you for presenting at TechReady11, the conference organizers gave me (and presumably the other speakers) a portable speaker with the Windows logo printed on it. The speaker underneath the logo is the X-Mini II Capsule Speaker, and I have to agree with Steve Clayton that they pack a lot of sound in a compact size. Great for ...

Hey there token, long time no see! (Did you do something with your hair?)

September 10, 2010 Sep 10, 2010 09/10/10
Raymond Chen
Consider a system where you have a lot of secured objects, and suppose further that checking whether a user has access to an object is a slow operation. This is not as rare as you might think: Even though a single access check against a security descriptor with a small number of ACEs might be fast, you can have objects with complicated ...

Flushing your performance down the drain, that is

September 9, 2010 Sep 9, 2010 09/9/10
Raymond Chen
Some time ago, Larry Osterman discussed the severe performance consequences of flushing the registry, which is a specific case of the more general performance catch: Flushing anything will cost you dearly. A while back, I discussed the high cost of the "commit" function, and all the flush-type operations turn into a commit at the end of ...

The contractually obligatory beeper, and the customers who demand them

September 8, 2010 Sep 8, 2010 09/8/10
Raymond Chen
One of the fun parts of meeting with other developers, either at conferences or on my self-funded book tour, is exchanging war stories. Here's one of the stories I've collected, from somebody describing a former company. As is customary, I've removed identifying information. One day, the engineering team were instructed that the team was ...

What happens to a named object when all handles to it are closed?

September 3, 2010 Sep 3, 2010 09/3/10
Raymond Chen
A customer had a question about named kernel objects: I understand that handles in a process if leaked will be destroyed by the kernel when the process exits. My question would be around named objects. Would named objects hold their value indefinitely? If I run a small utility app to increment a named counting semaphore, the count of that ...

It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway: If you grant users full control over critical files, then it's not the fault of the system for letting users modify them

September 2, 2010 Sep 2, 2010 09/2/10
Raymond Chen
Today's dubious security vulnerability is another example of If you reconfigure your computer to be insecure, don't be surprised that there's a security vulnerability. This example comes from by an actual security vulnerability report submitted to Microsoft: I have found a critical security vulnerability that allows arbitrary elevation to ...