The Old New Thing

July 2011 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

The danger of making the chk build stricter is that nobody will run it

July 18, 2011 Jul 18, 2011 07/18/11
Raymond Chen
Our old pal Norman Diamond suggested that Windows should go beyond merely detecting dubious behavior on debug builds and should kill the application when it misbehaves. The thing is, if you make an operating system so strict that the slightest misstep results in lightning bolts from the sky, then nobody would run it. Back in the days of 16-...

What is that horrible grinding noise coming from my floppy disk drive?

July 14, 2011 Jul 14, 2011 07/14/11
Raymond Chen
Wait, what's a floppy disk drive? For those youngsters out there, floppy disks are where we stored data before the invention of the USB earring. A single floppy disk could hold up to two seconds of CD-quality audio. This may not sound like a lot, but it was in fact pretty darned awesome, because CDs hadn't been invented yet either. Anyway, ...

The tradition of giving cute names to unborn babies

July 13, 2011 Jul 13, 2011 07/13/11
Raymond Chen
Many of my friends gave names to their unborn babies. Most of them were based on various objects that were the size of the adorable little parasite¹ at the time they discovered that they were pregnant: There were a few outliers, though. That last one takes a bit of explaining. Having grown tired of people asking her what she was ...

What does the executable timestamp really mean?

July 13, 2011 Jul 13, 2011 07/13/11
Raymond Chen
A customer was looking for some information on the executable timestamp: I would like my program to display the date it was linked. The looks like what I need. Is there an easy way to retrieve this information so I don't have to parse the EXE header myself? Also, what functions exist for formatting this timestamp into something human-...

At least it'll be easy to write up the security violation report

July 12, 2011 Jul 12, 2011 07/12/11
Raymond Chen
Many years ago, Microsoft instituted a new security policy at the main campus: all employees must visibly wear their identification badge, even when working in their office. As is customary with with nearly all new security policies, it was met with resistance. One of my colleagues was working late, and his concentration was interrupted by a ...

We've traced the pipe, and it's coming from inside the process!

July 8, 2011 Jul 8, 2011 07/8/11
Raymond Chen
We saw last time one of the deadlocks you can run into when playing with pipes. Today we'll look at another one: Our program runs a helper process with stdin/stdout/stderr redirected. The helper process takes input via stdin and prints the result to stdout. Sometimes we find that the from the controlling process into the stdin pipe hangs...

And… that cadence means it's halftime, concert-goers!

July 7, 2011 Jul 7, 2011 07/7/11
Raymond Chen
In college, one of my classmates (who is now the conductor of an orchestra, so I guess that whole music thing worked out for him) coined the term halftime to refer to a resounding cadence in the first half of a piece, the type of cadence that might fool an inattentive or unseasoned listener into thinking that the piece is over, when in fact it...