Showing results for July 2014 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Back in the days of Windows 95 development, one of my colleagues debugged a line-of-business application for a major delivery service. This was a program that the company gave to its top-tier high-volume customers, so that they could place and track their orders directly. And by directly, I mean that the program dialed the modem (since that w...

As previously noted, Outdoor Trek will be staging live performances of the Star Trek episode Mirror, Mirror. The schedule is up. Three weekends starting this Saturday at Blanche Lavizzo Park. Saturday performances are 7pm; Sunday performances are 2pm. Admission is free. Attend if you dare.

A customer asked for assistance interpreting a failure of the function. We are observing that is intermittently behaving as follows: That's all the information we have in our log files. We don't know the value of or , sorry. We realize that this is a rather vague question, but when this problem hits our machines, it causes our internal l...

First of all, normal programs shouldn't be messing with Windows Update configuration. That's something the user (or the user's administrator) decides. If you're an IT administrator, then you can use Group Policy to configure Windows Update on your network. But maybe you're a special case where the above remarks don't apply. Say you're a data ce...

A feature request.

In number theory, a composition of an integer is an ordered sequence of positive integers which sum to the target value. For example, the value 3 can be written as 3, 1+2, 2+1, or 1+1+1. You can think about the target number as a string of stars, and a composition is a way of breaking the stars into groups. For example, here are the compositions...

A customer asked whether it was okay to use a duplicated handle even after the original handle was closed. Yes. That's sort of why you would duplicate it. Duplicating a handle creates a second handle which refers to the same underlying object as the original. Once that's done, the two handles are completely equivalent. There's no way to know whic...

Suppose you have a function that creates a reference to a COM object: There are a few issues with this design. First of all, it requires that whoever uses your header file must have included first, since that's where is defined. You could solve that problem by putting at the top of , but that creates its own problems. For example, many hea...

Diminishing returns.

You have to find the right check box.