Showing archive results for 2010

Writing that entry last Friday reminded me that I never did share my stories of that emergency vacation, save for a cryptic list of learnings. Here's a little story about the ferry crossing. Part of the trip involved driving from Copenhagen (København) to Munich (München), which means taking a ferry. (It's faster than driving down t...

I was not involved in this debugging puzzle, but I was informed of its conclusions, and I think it illustrates both the process of debugging as well as uncovering a common type of defect. I've written it up in the style of a post-mortem. A user reported that if they press and hold the F2 key for about a minute, our program eventually stops work...

It's that time again: Sending some link love to my colleagues.

A customer had a programming problem regarding tab stops: I create a parent window (child of main frame) as below This window hosts 2 toolbar windows. Each toolbar window has the style set using . MSDN states WS_EX_CONTROLPARENT Allows the user to navigate among the child windows of the window by using the TAB key. But I am not able ...

After the opening work of the Seattle Symphony concert last Saturday night, the orchestra members rearranged themselves to play the Foote, but conductor Gerard Schwarz didn't come out onto the stage. The delay grew and people started wondering what was going on. An announcement was made over the public address system: "We apologize for the delay...

A customer ran into the following problem: I was trying to add another email account to Outlook, and the instructions say that I should go to the mail icon in the Control Panel, which to my surprise is nowhere to be found! How can I figure out what went wrong? A little bit of psychic debugging will solve this. The customer was running Windows&n...

Today is Microsoft's annual Company Meeting. Back in August, the Real Estate and Facilities department sent a message to our group of buildings to inform us that the locker rooms would be closed "due to the filming of an upcoming corporate initiative." Speculation swirled as to what sort of "upcoming corporate initiative" would require filming in...

Some time ago, we had some people over our house for dinner, and we had a selection of desserts including chocolate-covered macadamia nuts. The children in attendance finished their dinner before the adults (because the adults were busy doing boring things like talking) and were excused to go play. It so happens that the play room is right next t...

Via the Suggestion Box, Arno Shoedl asked, "could not a lot of compatibility problems be solved by simply declaring (via manifest?) the earliest and latest version of Windows a program has been tested to run on?" Actually, programs already declare that, sort of. Each module has a subsystem field in the header that specifies the earliest version of...

Brazil nuts are perhaps best known for floating to the top of a jar of mixed nuts. According to Wikipedia,¹ the reason for the phenomenon is not well understood. At least in my house, the reason for the phenomenon is quite clear: Brazil nuts float to the top because nobody in my house likes Brazil nuts. When you reach in and grab a handful o...