My young niece received the game Candy Land and wants to play it several times a day. Naturally, I am frequently drafted as an opponent. I discovered that my niece cheats rampantly. Sometimes, she will advance three green squares instead of two. Or if a yellow card will take her to a licorice square (lose a turn), she will ignore it and go to the...
Suppose your application crashes and debugger X is automatically connected because that's how the system happened to be configured. But you would prefer to use debugger Y. After installing debugger Y, how do you switch the debugger from X to Y? If you try to connect debugger Y to the process, you get the error code , b...
Seventh grade students (ages 12 to 13, roughly) were asked to write an essay on what success is and how you know when you've achieved it. The assignment was given under standardized test conditions: 90 minutes with nothing but pencil and paper, with an additional hour available upon request. (In practice, few students ask for the extra hour.) Rem...
Some follow-up remarks to my old posting on rotating a two-dimensional array: Some people noticed that the article I linked to purporting to rotate the array actually transposes it. I was wondering how many people would pick up on that. I was surprised that people confused rotating an array (or matrix) with creating a rotation matrix. They ar...
Due to a confluence of circumstances involving parents on an overseas vacation and other older relatives choosing not to attend (probably related to parents being out of town), I ended up being the oldest person at the extended family holiday dinner table. This was a first for me, and I resisted the urge to shout "Get off my lawn!" to the assemble...
Meetings are so passé. You no longer have a meeting with a customer; you have an engagement: I have a customer engagement tomorrow and they have a question surrounding Feature X. Note that this use of the phrase customer engagement is different from the process known as customer engagement. The process is an ongoing interaction, a lo...
Joe McManis runs the Snowflake Fail blog, which chronicles the various places non-hexagonal snowflakes are found in nature marketing. Bonus snowflake failage:
Commenter Yuhong Bao suggests, "How about not granting debug privileges on the user? This will make bypassing the protection impossible." This is such a great idea that Windows has worked that way for years. Normal non-administrative users do not have debug privilege. They can only debug processes that they already have to. In other words, non-...
Darek Mihocka, proprietor of emulators.com, and whom I linked to a few years ago, released the source code to Atari ST emulator Gemulator 9.0, and in celebration, he also posted his 1992 promotional video to YouTube: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Warning: It's a really bad video. The music, the hair, the cheesy video effects, the bad acting, oh ...
We saw last time that the COM rules for output pointers are that they must be initialized on return from a function, even if the function fails. The COM marshaller relies on this behavior, but then again, so do you; you just don't realize it yet. If you use a smart pointer library (be it ATL or boost or whatever), you are still relying on output...
