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November 30, 2012Nov 30, 201211/30/12A colleague was studying a very strange failure,
which I’ve simplified for expository purpose.
The component in question has the following
basic shape, ignoring error checking:
// This is a multithreaded object
class Foo
{
public:
void BeginUpdate();
void EndUpdate();
// These methods can be called at any time
int GetSomething(int x);
November 29, 2012Nov 29, 201211/29/12Okay, if you have a UI thread that pumps messages, then the easiest
way to perform an operation after a delay is to set a timer.
But let’s say you don’t have a UI thread that you can count on.
One method is to burn a thread:
#define ACTIONDELAY (30 * 60 * 1000) // 30 minutes,
November 28, 2012Nov 28, 201211/28/12Jonathan wonders why we have both find and findstr, and furthermore, why the two programs have unrelated features. The find program supports UTF-16, which findstr doesn’t; on the other hand, the findstr program supports regular expressions, which find does not.
The reason why their feature sets are unrelated is that the two programs are unrelated.
November 27, 2012Nov 27, 201211/27/12There is an entire subculture of l33t l4x0rs who occasionally
pop into our world,
and as such have to
adapt their
communication style to match their audience.
Sometimes the adaptation is incomplete.
I have appended a file exploit.pl which exploits a vulnerability
in XYZ version N.M.
November 26, 2012Nov 26, 201211/26/12I noted to some friends that the weather forecast for Seattle two weekends ago called for rain on Friday, rain on Saturday, and rain on Sunday. But at least on Monday, the forecast was not for rain.
It was for heavy rain.
November 26, 2012Nov 26, 201211/26/12Amit wonders how Windows chooses where to place a newly-opened window on a multiple-monitor system and gives as an example an application whose monitor choice appears inconsistent.
The easy part is if the application specifies where it wants the window to be.
November 23, 2012Nov 23, 201211/23/12Today is the traditional start of the holiday shopping season in the United States. If you are thinking of getting something from Williams-Sonoma, Drew Margary has selected a few items of note for your consideration (NSFW: language).
(It cracks me up that the model is using the batter dispenser which “measures out uniform circles”
November 23, 2012Nov 23, 201211/23/12In addition to specific performance tests run by individual feature teams, Windows has a suite of automated performance tests operated by the performance team, and the results are collated across a lot of metrics. When a number is out of the ordinary,
November 22, 2012Nov 22, 201211/22/12A customer was having trouble with
nested dialogs.
They were doing something very similar to a property sheet,
with a main frame dialog, and then a collection of child dialogs
that take turns appearing inside the frame dialog
based on what the user is doing.
November 21, 2012Nov 21, 201211/21/12A security vulnerability report arrived which went roughly like this:
When you programmatically enable the XYZ feature, the user receives no visual alert that it is enabled. As a result, malware can enable this feature and use it as part of an attempt to turn the machine into a botnet zombie.
