December 2013 | The Old New Thing

2013 year-end link clearance

Raymond ChenDecember 31, 2013Dec 31, 201312/31/13

Another round of the semi-annual link clearance. And, as always, the obligatory plug for my column in TechNet Magazine: The retirement of TechNet Magazine also spells the end of the Windows Confidential column, so this is the last of the obligatory plugs, at least until I have some other obligatory thing to plug.

New Year's Eve is sometimes a stressful occasion

Raymond ChenDecember 31, 2013Dec 31, 201312/31/13

Today is New Year's Eve, another opportunity for to mark that an approximately-integral number of revolutions of the earth have occurred since some point in time that wasn't even calculated correctly in the first place. (We retain it for backward compatibility.) December 31, 1999 was a particularly anxious day in the technology sector. Micros

There's no seating up there, so you just have to hang on for dear life

Raymond ChenDecember 30, 2013Dec 30, 201312/30/13

I dreamed that through a friend, I got to join a handful of other people atop Prince Charles's carriage as it wound its way through London. There was no seating up there, so you just have to hang on for dear life. When we reached Buckingham Palace, the assembled crowd and reporters swarmed the carriage for an opportunity to meet the Prince. T

How can I get the list of programs the same way that Programs and Features gets it?

Raymond ChenDecember 30, 2013Dec 30, 201312/30/13

A customer wanted to get the list of programs the same way that the Programs and Features folder gets it. Here, here's an idea: Instead of trying to mimic the Programs and Features folder, just ask the Programs and Features folder for its contents! That way, no matter what changes are made to how the Programs and Features folder obtains its

Brief Q&A on the HeapEnableTerminationOnCorruption heap information flag

Raymond ChenDecember 27, 2013Dec 27, 201312/27/13

Question: What type of heaps are controlled by the HeapEnableTerminationOnCorruption flag? Answer: Any user-mode heap created by the HeapCreate function. This includes the process heap (GetProcessHeap) but not the managed heap. Some components use HeapCreate under the hood. If so, then those heaps woul

I think we're going to be getting frozen leftovers for lunch today

Raymond ChenDecember 26, 2013Dec 26, 201312/26/13

There are a few times a year when a large fraction of employees are out on vacation at the same time, such as a single work day wedged between a holiday and a weekend (as happened this year on July 5). The most extreme case of this is the week between the Christmas holiday and New Year's Day, where the offices are practically empty. On t

Why is GetWindowLongPtr returning a garbage value on 64-bit Windows?

Raymond ChenDecember 26, 2013Dec 26, 201312/26/13

A customer was running into problems with their application on 64-bit Windows 8. They claimed that on Windows 8, the GetWindowLongPtr is returning a garbage pointer, which causes their program to crash. The same program works fine on 64-bit Windows 7. They asked the Windows team why they broke GetWindow

The chain of stories triggered by seeing a package of Ahoj-Brause

Raymond ChenDecember 25, 2013Dec 25, 201312/25/13

While surfing the Web aimlessly doing valuable background research, I happened across a page that had a picture of a package of Ahoj-Brause (pronounced ahoy browse-uh). Seeing that package triggered a bunch of memories. My emergency vacation from several years ago included a visit to a friend spending the year at Uppsala University in Swede

Essays from the funniest man in Microsoft Research

Raymond ChenDecember 24, 2013Dec 24, 201312/24/13

James Mickens has written a number of essays for ;login: magazine. The wall-of-text presentation is kind of scary, and the first time I encountered them, I skimmed the essays rather than reading them through. As a result, my reaction was, "I got tired." But if you follow the path and read the essays through, you realize that they are all brill

That doesn't sound like South Frisian to me

Raymond ChenDecember 23, 2013Dec 23, 201312/23/13

I dreamed that I was back in college taking a course in South Frisian, but I suspected something was up because the words didn't sound Germanic at all, and we were taught the words to a Christmas carol as Nom Yom Hear What I Hear? Also, because the course was taught by known prevaricator/exaggerator Robert Irvine.

The Old New Thing