Showing archive results for 2012

A customer reported that the function was failing with the unusual error code : The customer continued, "The documentation for says that the parameter must not contain the backslash character. Clearly we are in error for having passed an illegal character, but why are we getting the strange error code? There is no file path involved. Right n...

When I was signing the papers for a house purchase many years ago, I noticed that the deed papers read The Grantor «names of people selling the house» for and in consideration of TEN DOLLARS AND OTHER GOOD AND VALUABLE CONSIDERATION in hand paid, conveys and warrants to «me» the following described real estate... I n...

A customer asked, "I have a Unicode string. I want to know what language that string is in. Is there a function that can give me this information? I am most interested in knowing whether it is written in an East Asian language." The problem of determining the language in which a run of text is written is rather difficult. Many languages share the ...

McClatchy Newspapers discovers, to everyone's surprise, that work-at-home job offers are mostly just scams. Of course, this is something Rob Cockerham discovered years ago. (He also has a rundown of all his articles on the subject, in case you haven't gotten enough.)

A customer wanted to know the internal file format of Visual SourceSafe databases. (That wasn't the actual question, but I've translated it into something equivalent but which requires less explanation.) They explained why they wanted this information: We are doing some code engineering analysis on our project, so we need to extract data about eve...

Researchers have determined that the key to losing weight is to consume fewer calories. Okay, it's actually more interesting than the summary suggests. The researchers compared a variety of different popular diets and found that it didn't matter what diet you were on; the weight loss (and regain) was the same. The controlling factor was how many...

Chris asked for some stories about what Explorer was like in the early days. Well, one thing is that the original name of Explorer was Cabinet, continuing the folder/document metaphor by taking all your folders and documents and putting them inside a virtual filing cabinet. (Cabinet was viewed as an update to the Windows 3.1 File Manager pro...

I feel sorry for the people who live near Abbey Road or who have to take that road as part of their daily routine, because tourists keep blocking traffic to recreate the cover of the eponymous Beatles album. The recording studio has a webcam on the intersection so you can watch the mayhem as it happens. Update: Just this morning, I checked out ...

A customer reported that they were receiving some assertion failures because the function was failing with what they believed to be a valid heap block, and the function reported that the reason for failure was . What's going on? One of my colleagues asked the psychic question, "Is the process exiting?" "Why yes, in fact it is. How did you know?...

In one of my mathematics classes, the professor noted (and freely admitted that the joke was not original with him), "There are essentially two groups of mathematicians: Those that have read Weyl and those that have not. And once you enter the first group, you will never be understood by anyone in the second group." I guess it's only funny to mat...