Dev Blogs
Professor Ted Bunn (no relation), who still gets email about a Black Holes FAQ he wrote over fifteen years ago, recently blogged about what happens when you suspend a Slinky vertically, then let go. No wait, come back. In Part the First, he provides an alternate (but equivalent) explanation for the phenomenon. Allen Downey on his wonderfull...
Some time back, I provided informal guidance regarding what types of files go into which folders. Here are the official guidelines [pdf], for those looking for something with more authority than just me blathering.
A customer reported that they were observing that some users were finding their taskbar set to auto-hide even though the standard configuration in the company is for the auto-hide feature to be disabled. Going into Taskbar Properties shows Auto-hide the taskbar checked. None of the users had changed their setting to auto-hide manually, so the quest...
In the history of the Internet, there have been many cases of one company providing a service, and others trying to piggyback off the service through a nonstandard client. The result is usually a back-and-forth where the provider changes the interface, the piggybacker reverse-engineers the interface, back and forth, until one side finally g...
Today's rant is a blend of two earlier rants: People didn't answer your first email for a reason and If you didn't like the answer, asking the same question again is unlikely to help. A customer submitted a list of questions (via their customer liaison) to the Widgets discussion list, and somebody wrote up a reply, which was sent back to the cus...
Commenter Roni put two suggestions in the suggestion box in the same entry, which is a problem for me because I feel like I'm forced to answer both of them or neither. The first question suggestion has to do with how shortcuts can find their targets even if they've been renamed. This is something I had covered nearly a year before the question w...
Another round of the semi-annual link clearance. And, as always, the obligatory plug for my column in TechNet Magazine:
Last 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, but that idea comes with its own problems: You are patching addresses...
Commenter 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: What could possibly go wrong? You check the length of the string, and if it doesn't fit in the buffer, then you reject it. Therefore, y...
A 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. How is it possible for a 2.5GB drive to have 3.81TB free? While there have certainly been examples of Explorer showing confusing values the reason for the strange results was, at least t...