September 28, 2012Sep 28, 201209/28/12My Q1 and Q3 link clearances are traditionally for links to other Microsoft bloggers, but this time I’m going to link to a few Microsoft research papers I found interesting.
Why do Nigerian scammers say they’re from Nigeria?
Short answer: Because it ensures that the replies come only from the most gullible people on earth.
September 28, 2012Sep 28, 201209/28/12A customer reported a problem with the
SystemTimeToTzSpecificLocalTime
function.
(Gosh, why couldn’t they have reported a problem with a function with
a shorter name!
Now I have to type that thing over and over again.)
We’re having a problem with the
SystemTimeToTzSpecificLocalTime
function.
September 27, 2012Sep 27, 201209/27/12An acquaintance of mine remarked that he sold his bicycle in Seattle a few months ago to some guy who explained, “I’m going to ride it to South America.”
“Okay,” my acquaintance said, probably with some degree of skepticism.
But it’s a real project,
September 27, 2012Sep 27, 201209/27/12A customer was having trouble with their RGS file.
I want to include the below line in a .rgs file:
val HandlerPath = s ‘%windir%\system32\awesome.dll’.
When I do this, registering of the dll fails with 80002009. Any help?
If I change it to
val HandlerPath = s ‘C:\windows\system32\awesome.dll’.
September 26, 2012Sep 26, 201209/26/12A customer reported a problem with the WaitForSingleObject
function:
I have a DLL with an
Initialize() function and an
Uninitialize() function.
The code goes like this:
HANDLE FooMutex;
BOOL Initialize()
{
… unrelated initialization stuff …
FooMutex = CreateMutex(NULL, FALSE, “FooMutex”);
September 25, 2012Sep 25, 201209/25/12A customer wanted to know how to set Size all columns to fit as the default for all Explorer windows. (I found an MSDN forum thread on the same subject, and apparently, the inability to set Size all columns to fit as the default is “an enormous oversight and usability problem.”)
The confusion stems from the phrasing of the option;
September 24, 2012Sep 24, 201209/24/12A classification of faces with eyes open and closed in Dr. Seuss’s ABC: An Amazing Alphabet Book! based on the nature of the character
Narrators
OtherUnspectacled
OtherBespectacled
Eyes
Open
Closed
Open
Closed
Open
Closed
Endpaper
2
Title
2
A
2
2
B
2
2
2
C
2
1
D
2
E
1
2
F
1
G
2
1
H
2
1
I
2
J
1
K
1
3
L
2
M
1
5
N
11
O
1
1
P
4
4
Q
2
R
2
S
1
T
10
U
1
V
2
1
W
1
1
1
X
1
1
Y
2
Z
2
2
1
Total
18
6
13
56
3
0
Eyes
Open
Closed
Open
Closed
Open
Closed
Narrators
OtherUnspectacled
OtherBespectacled
September 24, 2012Sep 24, 201209/24/12Clipboard Gadget wants to know why normal processes can kill elevated processes via TerminateProcess, yet they cannot do a trivial ShowWindow(hwnd, SW_MINIMIZE). “Only explorer seems to be able to do so somehow.”
There are several questions packed into this “suggestion.” (As it happens,
September 21, 2012Sep 21, 201209/21/12One of my friends bought me a souvenir one one of his trips to Germany. It is a beer mug from Bayerischer Bahnhof, a restaurant and brewery at the Leipzig Bayerischer Bahnhof. The mug carries the brewery’s slogan In vollen Zügen genießen,
September 21, 2012Sep 21, 201209/21/12A colleague needed some help with manipulating SAFEARRAYs.
I have some generic code to execute WMI queries and store the
result as strings.
Normally,
VariantChangeType(VT_BSTR) does the work,
but
VariantChangeType doesn’t know how to
convert arrays (e.g. VT_ARRAY | VT_INT).
And there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to convert the array
element-by-element because SafeArrayGetElement
expects a pointer to an object of the
underlying type,
