The Old New Thing

May 2011 - Page 3 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Your program loads libraries by their short name and you don't even realize it

May 5, 2011 May 5, 2011 05/5/11
Raymond Chen
In the discussion of the problems that occur if you load the same DLL by both its short and long names, Xepol asserted that any program which loads a DLL by its short name "would have ONLY itself to blame for making stupid, unpredictable, asinine assumptions" and that Windows should "change the loader to NOT load any dll with a short name ...
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Why don't the file timestamps on an extracted file match the ones stored in the ZIP file?

May 4, 2011 May 4, 2011 05/4/11
Raymond Chen
A customer liaison had the following question: My customer has ZIP files stored on a remote server being accessed from a machine running Windows Server 2003 and Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration. When we extract files from the ZIP file, the last-modified time is set to the current time rather than the time specified in the ...

Like a chicken talking to a duck

May 3, 2011 May 3, 2011 05/3/11
Raymond Chen
Many years ago, I called the home of my Chinese-speaking nieces. This was before they started learning English and before I started learning their dialect of Chinese. After the call was over, the eldest niece asked, "Who was that on the phone?" "That was Uncle Raymond." "Oh, I want to talk to Uncle Raymond!" Her mother replied, "That'd be ...

That's not a duck

May 3, 2011 May 3, 2011 05/3/11
Raymond Chen
One of the audio features added to Windows 7 goes by the formal name stream attenuation, but it is more commonly known to people in the audio world as ducking. Ducking is the process of lowering the volume of background sounds in order to draw more attention to the foreground sound. For example, when you're watching a big battle scene in...

The Importance of Being Snooki

May 2, 2011 May 2, 2011 05/2/11
Raymond Chen
What if Jersey Shore were actually a play written by Oscar Wilde? Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing from Broadway's current production of The Importance of Being Earnest explore that premise in a five-part series titled "Jersey Shore" Gone Wilde, drawing its dialogue from things actually said on "Jersey Shore". The dialogue and delivery...

Hidden compatibility constraints of redirecting program execution via a stub

May 2, 2011 May 2, 2011 05/2/11
Raymond Chen
One of the "obvious" solutions to the issue of how much work you're willing to do to save 68KB of disk space was to replace one of the copies with a stub that launches the other copy. If you try this obvious solution, you may run into some compatibility issues. First of all, there are programs which launch Notepad and then wait on the ...