June 29, 2012Jun 29, 201206/29/12Another round of the semi-annual link clearance.
Seattle says, “My hometown is better than yours.” Chuck Norris fact: Chuck Norris learned how to be awesome from Seattle.
What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics? What’s even more interesting is that many of these traits apply to other skills,
June 29, 2012Jun 29, 201206/29/12Last week, I described how real-mode Windows fixed up jumps to functions that got discarded. But what about return addresses to functions that got discarded?
The naïve solution would be to allocate a special “return address recovery” function for each return address you found,
June 28, 2012Jun 28, 201206/28/12Commenter
POKE53280,0
claims,
“If one validates parameters before using string functions
(which quality programmers should do),
the ‘safe’ functions have no reason to exist.”
Consider the following function:
int SomeFunction(const char *s)
{
char buffer[256];
if (strlen(s) ≥ 256) return ERR;
June 27, 2012Jun 27, 201206/27/12A customer observed that the entry for a network drive looked liked this in My Computer, well, except that there was a network drive icon instead of ASCII art.
O
Public (\\server) (S:)
3.81TB free of 2.5GB
How is it possible for a 2.5GB drive to have 3.81TB free?
June 26, 2012Jun 26, 201206/26/12Every few years, the building maintenance people have to perform tests on the elevators to ensure they meet safety regulations. And the real estate department sends out the usual notice informing the building occupants that the elevators in the building will be taken out of service at various times during the day.
June 25, 2012Jun 25, 201206/25/12Ian Boyd wants to know why the specific value of 500ms was chosen as the edit delay in Windows Explorer.
Because it’s your double-click time.
Since the double-click action (execute) is not an extension of the single-click action (edit), Explorer (and more generally,
June 22, 2012Jun 22, 201206/22/12In a discussion of how real-mode Windows
walked stacks,
commenter Matt wonders
about fixing jumps in the rest of the code to the discarded functions.
I noted in the original article that
“there are multiple parts to the solution”
and that stack-walking was just one piece.
June 21, 2012Jun 21, 201206/21/12One quirk of nested dialogs lies in what happens when the user
presses Enter to invoke the default pushbutton:
The resulting
WM_COMMAND message
goes to the top-level dialog,
even if the default pushbutton belongs to a sub-dialog.
Why doesn’t it send the WM_COMMAND to the parent
of the default pushbutton?
June 20, 2012Jun 20, 201206/20/12Today is the last day of school in Seattle public school. My friend the seventh-grade teacher told me that students count down to the last day of school in a rather unusual way.
Some people might count the number of calendar days until the end of school.
June 20, 2012Jun 20, 201206/20/12The WS_EX_CONTROLPARENT extended style (known in dialog templates as DS_CONTROL) instructs the dialog manager that the dialog’s children should be promoted into the dialog’s parent. This is easier to explain in pictures than in text. Given the following window hierarchy:
