December 31, 2013Dec 31, 201312/31/13Another round of the semi-annual link clearance.
Testing informercial workout systems.
Understanding the Galaga No-Fire cheat.
Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600.
Reasons My Son Is Crying.
A technical look at the Win32 thread pool.
Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking.
December 31, 2013Dec 31, 201312/31/13Today 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,
December 30, 2013Dec 30, 201312/30/13I 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.
December 30, 2013Dec 30, 201312/30/13A 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!
December 27, 2013Dec 27, 201312/27/13Question: 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 would also be affected.
December 26, 2013Dec 26, 201312/26/13There 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,
December 26, 2013Dec 26, 201312/26/13A 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
GetWindowLongPtr.
December 25, 2013Dec 25, 201312/25/13While 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 Sweden.
December 24, 2013Dec 24, 201312/24/13James 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.”
December 23, 2013Dec 23, 201312/23/13I 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?
