Showing archive results for 2013

Um, not really.

I dreamed that I was attending some sort of "how to be awesome" seminar where the presenter said, among other things, that a sea turtle, when left to thrive undisturbed, amasses $1 million in personal wealth within one year.

Today's Little Program uses the function to print the mapping of logical processors to physical processors, as well as the mapping of logical processors to packages. (A dual-core processor is a single package with two cores. If those cores are themselves dual-hyperthreaded, then you have four logical processors total.) The helper function tak...

Here's a little puzzle inspired by an actual bug: Can the assertion at the start of ever fire? Naturally, the answer is Yes, otherwise it wouldn't be a very interesting article. The assertion can fire if the worker thread starts running before the call the returns. In that case, the caller hasn't yet received the handle or ID of the newly...

Windows 7 introduces a new flag to the function called . The documentation says that it "uses a larger buffer for directory queries, which can increase performance of the find operation." This is classic MSDN-style normative documentation: It provides "just the facts". Far be it for MSDN to tell you how to write your application; the job of f...

Big PATH attack.

One of my colleagues told me a story from his days on the Windows team. He had to give a presentation to his vice president on his feature, and he prepared his presentation and demo obsessively to make sure it went smoothly. At the meeting, there were three presentations on the schedule, all of them with features targeting IT professionals. The fi...

I dreamed that I was composing a blog entry about one of my dreams, but I had to do it on a toy cash register which had been paired to my computer. It turns out that this is difficult for a number of reasons. For one thing, the cash register has only ten letters of the alphabet on it. You have to switch to the alternate keyboard for the rest. Als...

Today's Little Program takes the JavaScript application from a few years ago and converts it to C#. This was inspired by a customer who started with the question, "How can I close all Internet Explorer windows programmatically?" This was a strange request. After all, the user may be rather upset that their Amazon shopping spree was suddenly ter...

A customer had a supervisor process whose job is to launch two threads. Each thread in turn launches a child process, let's call them A and B, each with redirected standard handles. They spins up separate threads to read from the child processes' stdout in order to avoid deadlocks. What they've found is that even though child process&nbs...