Showing archive results for 2013

If a parameter to a C# method is declared with the keyword, then it can match either itself or a comma-separated list of um itselves(?). Consider: This program prints The first call to does not take advantage of the keyword and passes the array explicitly (formally known as normal form). The second call, however, specifies the integers d...

I dreamed that Costco announced that they were closing for the Mayan apocalypse and would reopen two weeks later. Not because they believed in it. Rather, because that was their estimate as to how long it would take people to get through their stockpiles and be ready to go shopping again. Curiously, I had this dream several weeks after the apoca...

Welcome to CLR Week 2013, returned from its two-year hiatus. A customer reported that when they checked with the debugger, reported even though they were running on an x86 machine, which is a little-endian architecture. The bytes are extracted in little-endian order, despite the claim that the machine is big-endian. "I don't get it." I d...

You can't just let anybody into your safety bubble.

A customer reported that their taskbar would sometimes spontaneously go into auto-hide mode. What made this particularly insidious was that they had deployed a group policy to prevent users from changing the auto-hide state (because they never wanted the taskbar to auto-hide), so when the taskbar went into auto-hide mode, there was no way to get i...

A customer wanted to know why Explorer showed one of their servers in the folder list the normal way: ⊞ servername but another server showed up "where the server name is parentheses and the node name is in front." ⊞ nodename (servername) "Where is Explorer getting that information, and why are the two servers showing up in di...

Internal to Microsoft are thousands of Web sites. This is a story about one of them. On an internal discussion list, somebody asked We just created a new Flurb. Does anyone know how to get listed on http://internalsite/newflurbs? I hadn't heard of that site before, but I checked it out. Neat, it's basically a blog which announces new Flurbs. I...

I dreamed that I was attending a Star Trek-themed company party. Nobody was dressed as a Starfleet officer or anything exotic. Half of the people ignored the party theme and came in cocktail attire, and half were dressed in Renaissance or Elizabethan clothes, but they represented Star Trek aliens because they were not all white Europeans, and some ...

Disabling autorepeat in my ABC program was largely sufficient to keep my nieces happy, given their instructions to press only one key at a time. Once in a while, though, they would hit the context menu key in the bottom right corner of the keyboard, and then they'd get stuck because they didn't know how to dismiss it. So let's disable that key ...

I think it was a Chevy.