Showing archive results for 2010

As you are I'm sure aware, you shouldn't be doing much of anything in your function, but you have to watch out for cases where you end up doing them accidentally. Some time ago, I was investigating a failure which was traced back to loading a DLL inside . Wait, what kind of insane person loads a DLL as part of shutting down? Shouldn't you be cl...

Internet retailer woot! went to CES 2010 and covered it on their blog. (CES category.) But they don't cover what the media elite cover, the big announcements, the hot products. Nope, they cover the weird stuff. They have uncrating photos of CES itself, they infiltrate the The Consumer Breakfast Buffet Show, and they take super secret spy...

One category of the dubious security vulnerability is designing an insecure system, putting together an exploit, and then blaming one of the components of the exploit rather than the insecure system in the first place. I have found a critical security vulnerability in the XYZ scripting object which permits modifying files on the Web server itself...

Every so often, I'll run across a statement of the obvious disguised as news and post it to the News flash tag, but the ones I've found have nothing on this collection of the 11 Most Painfully Obvious Newspaper Articles Ever. Just click through and slap your forehead. Bonus News Flash: Mark McGwire used steroids. I can't wait to see what other...

A customer had the following problem: We're calling to retrieve the command line, and the documentation says that it returns a single null-terminated string. However, when we call it in our application, we find that it is actually a double-null-terminated string. The buffer returned consists of a series of null-terminated strings, one string per ...

While it's true that the cheesy Steve Ballmer Windows video had bad music, bad hair, and bad acting, it's also true that all that cheese was intentional. That video was produced for and shown at the Company Meeting, back when a mainstay of the Company Meeting was spoofs of popular television advertisements—what today would be called "virall...

Some years ago, one of my colleagues mentioned at the lunch table, "I went hiking this weekend, and man, my backpack was so heavy. I weighed it, and it was like 35 pounds. And then I realized, wait a second, I'm overweight by 35 pounds. I'm carrying this heavy backpack all the time!" Thus began a collective weight loss competition we called Weight...

I have a niece who is a native speaker of Chinese. Playing with her is a free language lesson, and there are advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that you will learn all the basic words, and you won't run the risk that your instructor will accidentally use some advanced vocabulary that will throw you off. (You also learn some words that ...

Ken Hagan wonders why compatibility workarounds aren't simply disabled when a debugger is attached. As I noted earlier, many compatibility workarounds are actually quicker than the code that detects whether the workaround would be needed. Now suppose you find a compatibility problem with some applications that expect the function to return ...

The function creates a special type of bitmap known as a DIB section. We've worked with these guys before: The feature of DIB sections that is by far the most interesting is that the raw pixels in the bitmap are mapped into your process space as if they were normal memory, which you can read from and write to directly. But what is the deal with...