Showing archive results for 2011

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, if you...

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 planning...

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-readable? ...

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 membe...

In the early days of Windows, there was a separate version of Windows for each language, and once you decided to install, say, the French version of Windows, you were locked into using French. You couldn't change your mind and, say, switch to German. The reason for this is that there were bits and pieces of language-dependent information stored al...

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. Clos...

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's ju...

Pipe in, pipe out.

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 spelling...

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 and want to send the console a Ctrl+Z. I've tried sending ASCII code 26, but that doesn't work. supports Ctrl+C and Ctrl+Break but not Ctrl+Z. Here's what I'm ...