July 2011

Be careful when redirecting both a process's stdin and stdout to pipes, for you can easily deadlock

Raymond Chen July 7, 2011 Jul 7, 2011 07/7/11

A common problem when people create a process and redirect both stdin and stdout to pipes is that they fail to keep the pipes flowing. Once a pipe clogs, the disturbance propagates backward until everything clogs up. Here is a common error, in pseudocode: You see code like this all over the place. I want to generate some input to a ...

The historical struggle over control of the Portuguese language

Raymond Chen July 6, 2011 Jul 6, 2011 07/6/11

Portugal has been going through a rough patch. Its international stature has diminished over the years, its economy has always struggled to remain competitive, the government had to accept a bailout to avoid defaulting on its debt, and on top of it all, it is losing control of its own language. In Portugal, the latest round of Portuguese ...

Looking at the problem at the wrong level: Closing a process's stdin

Raymond Chen July 6, 2011 Jul 6, 2011 07/6/11

A customer was having trouble manipulating the stdin stream that was given to a process. How do you simulate sending Ctrl+Z to a hidden console process programmatically? I am using RedirectStandardInput and want to send the console a Ctrl+Z. I've tried sending ASCII code 26, but that doesn't work. GenerateConsoleCtrl&...

Microspeak: Reporting through

Raymond Chen July 5, 2011 Jul 5, 2011 07/5/11

I'll start with the citation from a hypothetical conversation: "This is being handled by Jonathan Swift." — Who does he report through? "He reports up through Jane Austen's org." The Microspeak term report through (or report up through) comes up often in situations where people from different groups are working together. In its ...

A handful of trips through the time machine

Raymond Chen July 4, 2011 Jul 4, 2011 07/4/11

A few trips through the time machine: In the Internet Explorer time machine video, I was struck by the remark, "Appearance-wise, very little had changed [in Internet Explorer 4] since IE3. Not much changed in terms of functionality, either." In fact, Internet Explorer 4 was probably the most significant revision of Internet Explorer in...

The list of heaps returned by GetProcessHeaps is valid when it returns, but who knows what happens later

Raymond Chen July 1, 2011 Jul 1, 2011 07/1/11

A customer had a problem involving heap corruption. In our code, we call GetProcessHeaps and then for each heap, we call HeapSetInformation to enable the low fragmentation heap. However, the application crashes due to an invalid heap handle. My question is, why do we need to allocate an array of size 1025 even though...

The Old New Thing

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

Be careful when redirecting both a process's stdin and stdout to pipes, for you can easily deadlock

The historical struggle over control of the Portuguese language

Looking at the problem at the wrong level: Closing a process's stdin

Microspeak: Reporting through

A handful of trips through the time machine

The list of heaps returned by GetProcessHeaps is valid when it returns, but who knows what happens later

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