The Old New Thing

March 2014 - The Old New Thing

A puzzle involving dynamic programming, or maybe it doesn't

March 31, 2014 Mar 31, 2014 03/31/14
Raymond Chen
Here's a programming challenge: Evaluate the following recurrence relation efficiently for a given array [x0, …, xn−1] and integer k. Hint: Use dynamic programming. In words: If the array has only two elements, then the result is the average of the two elements. If the array has more than two elements, then ...
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The dangers of buffering up posted messages and then reposting them later

March 28, 2014 Mar 28, 2014 03/28/14
Raymond Chen
A customer wanted to check that their idea for solving a re-entrancy problem doesn't have any hidden gotchas. We have a window which processes incoming work. One of our work items enters a modal loop, and if new work gets posted to the window while the modal loop is running, our work manager gets re-entered, and Bad Things happen. Our ...
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Functions that return GDI regions rarely actually return regions

March 27, 2014 Mar 27, 2014 03/27/14
Raymond Chen
For reasons I don't quite understand, the only functions in GDI and USER which create GDI regions are the functions with Create in their name, like Create­Rect­Rgn or Create­Polygon­Rgn. All the other functions which return a region require you to pass an existing region to use as the output. I can see this being useful for ...
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Can CoCreateGuid ever return GUID_NULL?

March 26, 2014 Mar 26, 2014 03/26/14
Raymond Chen
A customer asked whether the Co­Create­Guid function can ever return GUID_NULL. Their code uses GUID_NULL for special purposes, and it would be bad if that was ever returned as the GUID for an object. "Can we assume that Co­Create­Guid never returns GUID_NULL? Or should we test the return value against GUID_NULL, and if it is ...
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Geeky t-shirt alert: Windows 7's so-called God Mode

March 25, 2014 Mar 25, 2014 03/25/14
Raymond Chen
Back in 2010, the so-called God Mode was the hit discovery of the Internet, at least until the next cute cat video made the rounds. If you had stopped by the Microsoft Visitor Center during that meme's brief moment in the sun, and wandered into the gift shop, you could have picked up a t-shirt that said {ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C...

Enumerating set partitions with Bell numbers and Stirling numbers of the second kind

March 24, 2014 Mar 24, 2014 03/24/14
Raymond Chen
Just for fun, today's Little Program is going to generate set partitions. (Why? Because back in 2005, somebody asked about it on an informal mailing list, suggesting it would be an interesting puzzle, and now I finally got around to solving it.) The person who asked the question said, Below we show the partitions of [4]. The periods ...
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Different senses of scale create different travel expectations

March 21, 2014 Mar 21, 2014 03/21/14
Raymond Chen
A friend of mine had a business meeting near London, and he decided to extend it to a tour of Scotland and England once the meetings were over. (This is the same friend who took me on the emergency vacation many years ago.) His plan was to rent a car early one morning and drive from the meeting location all the way up to Aberdeen at one go, ...

When visitors to the United States underestimate the size of the country

March 20, 2014 Mar 20, 2014 03/20/14
Raymond Chen
A friend of mine who is from Lebanon (but now lives in Seattle) invited his grandmother to come visit for the summer. When she arrived, he asked her, "Grandma, is there anywhere in particular you would like to visit?" His grandmother replied, "I'd like go to to Washington, DC." "Okay, Grandma. Let me buy some plane tickets." "No, let's ...

Going for the facts: Who is displaying this message box?

March 20, 2014 Mar 20, 2014 03/20/14
Raymond Chen
A customer wanted to know whether Create­Process had a problem with Unicode. A problem with it? Quite the contrary. Create­Process loves Unicode! In fact, if you call the ANSI version, it converts the strings to Unicode and then finishes the work in Unicode. Okay, here's the customer's problem. We have a custom application ...
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