December 11, 2013Dec 11, 201312/11/13There are some vice presidents who forget that not everybody attends the same meetings that they do. When they send email to the entire division, they use buzzwords and acronyms that are not widely-understood. For example, they may mention the great progress that the Nosebleed team is making with DOXLA,¹
December 10, 2013Dec 10, 201312/10/13A colleague of mine got a strange piece of email. It went something like this, although I’ve substituted a fictitious nation and fictitious company name to protect the guilty(?).
Subject: St. George’s Island Embassy Trade Mission: Meeting request on behalf of Contoso Corporation
Dear ⟨name⟩,
December 9, 2013Dec 9, 201312/9/13I dreamed that there was a fire in Benaroya Hall during a concert. The flames swirled overhead up by the ceiling.
The exit doors had been blocked by security, so people flowed from door to door looking for a way out.
December 9, 2013Dec 9, 201312/9/13Today’s Little Program
launches a child process
and then just hangs around.
If you terminate the parent process,
then all the children (and grandchildren and
great-grandchildren, you get the idea)
are also terminated.
The tool for this is the
Job Object.
December 6, 2013Dec 6, 201312/6/13A customer had a simple question: “Is it wrong to call SHFileOperation from a service?”
I don’t know if I’d call it wrong, but I’d call it highly inadvisable.
SHFileOperation was designed for interactive operations, so you’re using it outside its original design parameters.
December 5, 2013Dec 5, 201312/5/13While I was
looking for spelling errors in the registry,
I ran across the strange registry key
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\CLSID,
which has as its default value the stringified GUID
{0000031A-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}.
I asked the COM folks what the deal was with that.
They explained,
December 4, 2013Dec 4, 201312/4/13The WM_NOTIFY message takes the following parameters:
wParam = identifier of the control sending the message
lParam = pointer to a NMHDR structure
hwndFrom = handle of the control sending the message
idFrom = identifier of the control sending the message
code = notification code
other fields depending on the notification code
Notice that the identifier of the control sending the message appears in two places,
December 3, 2013Dec 3, 201312/3/13The Victoria Clipper is a high-speed ferry that runs primarily between Seattle and Vancouver Victoria, BC. Early Sunday morning, a man scaled a fence and drove off with one of the boats.
The issue was resolved without major incident and only minimal damage,
December 3, 2013Dec 3, 201312/3/13Windows Vista introduced Session 0 Isolation which enforces the rule that services should not display UI. If a service tries to display UI, another service known as the Interactive Services Detection service detects this situation and signals the user that a service wants to display UI and gives the user an opportunity to switch to the service desktop,
December 2, 2013Dec 2, 201312/2/13One evening, I had a series of three dreams. In each one, I visited an unusual home.
In the third dream, I visited the home of a friend of mine. He lived in a white stucco split-level, a stereotypical suburban home.
