April 29, 2011Apr 29, 201104/29/11My niece wanted to play my piano, and I asked her to wash her hands. She said, “I don’t need that, I have Magic Soap,” and she produced a bottle of hand sanitizer.
Um, the purpose of washing your hands isn’t so the piano doesn’t get sick.
April 29, 2011Apr 29, 201104/29/11Matt Pietrek noticed that
SetLastError and
RestoreLastError do exactly the same thing
and wondered why there’s a separate function for it.
It’s to assist in debugging and diagnostics.
Say you’re debugging a problem and
when you call GetLastError you get
ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED.
April 28, 2011Apr 28, 201104/28/11A friend of mind was asked out of the blue, “What does hypo mean?”
She started to flash back to high school English class and Greek word roots.
“I’ve started to hear it everywhere. Like Everyone in that meeting is a hypo or We need to reach out to hypos.”
April 27, 2011Apr 27, 201104/27/11Anonymous bemoans the fact that pinning programs to the Start menu (in Windows XP) actually pins the shortcut rather than the program itself. This means that if you right-click on a shortcut to pin it, then delete the shortcut, the pinned item stops working.
April 26, 2011Apr 26, 201104/26/11A customer asked what started out as a simple question, but by now you know that this sort of simple question only raises new questions:
Is there a way that we can detect that the user has hidden our notification icon?
April 25, 2011Apr 25, 201104/25/11Commenter KiwiBlue asks whether Captcha-style tests were considered to prevent unsigned drivers from programmatically clicking the ‘Install anyway’ button.
I’m sure somebody considered it, but Captcha has its own problems.
“Type the (distorted) letters below”-type Captcha cannot be used by people with visual impairments,
April 22, 2011Apr 22, 201104/22/11Even if you prefer to use a lock
(after all, they are much easier to program),
you can borrow some lock-free techniques.
For example, consider this:
CRITICAL_SECTION g_cs;
GORILLADATA g_data;
void PokeGorilla(double intensity)
{
EnterCriticalSection(&g_cs);
DeformGorilla(intensity, &g_data);
Reticulate(&g_data.spline);
int stress = CalculateTension(&g_data.spline);
April 21, 2011Apr 21, 201104/21/11GWO
wonders what the conditions are under which the lock-free version
significantly outpeforms a simple critical section.
Remember that switching to a lock-free algorithm should be guided
by performance measurements.
Switching from a simple algorithm to a complex one shouldn’t be done
unless you know that the simple algorithm is having trouble.
April 20, 2011Apr 20, 201104/20/11Adam Rosenfield pointed out
that it is not possible to fail an
asynchronous initialization;
if you pass
INIT_ONCE_INIT_FAILED
when completing an asynchronous initialization,
the function fails with
ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER.
(Serves me right for writing an article the night before it goes up.)
A more correct version is therefore
ITEMCONTROLLER *SingletonManager::Lookup(DWORD dwId)
{
…
April 19, 2011Apr 19, 201104/19/11At TechEd 2011 North America in Atlanta, Aaron Margosis is presenting a talk on Unintended Consequences of Security Lockdowns. I’ve seen the internal version of his talk and I give it two thumbs up. If you’re going to be at TechEd North America,
