September 2014 | Page 2 of 3 | The Old New Thing

Poor man's comments: Inserting text that has no effect into a configuration file

Raymond Chen September 17, 2014 Sep 17, 2014 09/17/14

Consider a program which has a configuration file, but the configuration file format does not have provisions for comments. Maybe the program has a "list of authorized users", where each line takes the form allow x or deny x, where x is a group or user. For example, suppose we have access_list that goes like this: This is the sort of file ...

Microspeak: spend

Raymond Chen September 16, 2014 Sep 16, 2014 09/16/14

Remember, Microspeak is not merely for jargon exclusive to Microsoft, but it's jargon you need to know. We don't encounter the term spend much in the engineering side of the company, but it's in common use among those who regularly deal with money and budgets. We are in line with company standards with regard to spend for this type of event...

Enumerating all the ways of making change

Raymond Chen September 15, 2014 Sep 15, 2014 09/15/14

Today's Little Program enumerates all the ways of making change for a particular amount given a set of available denominations. The algorithm is straightforward. To make change for a specific amount from a set of available denominations, you can take one denomination and decide how many of those you want to use. Then use the remaining ...

What did Windows 3.1 do when you hit Ctrl+Alt+Del?

Raymond Chen September 12, 2014 Sep 12, 2014 09/12/14

Figuring out what is messed up.

A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth: The continuing saga of the Windows 3.1 blue screen of death (which, by the way, was never called that)

Raymond Chen September 11, 2014 Sep 11, 2014 09/11/14

Not quite Truthiness, but getting close.

The history of Win32 critical sections so far

Raymond Chen September 11, 2014 Sep 11, 2014 09/11/14

The CRITICAL_SECTION structure has gone through a lot of changes since its introduction back oh so many decades ago. The amazing thing is that as long as you stick to the documented API, your code is completely unaffected. Initially, the critical section object had an owner field to keep track of which thread entered the critical section, ...

I wrote the original blue screen of death, sort of

Raymond Chen September 10, 2014 Sep 10, 2014 09/10/14

It was blue, but it wasn't completely deadly.

Steve Ballmer did not write the text for the blue screen of death

Raymond Chen September 9, 2014 Sep 9, 2014 09/9/14

Mixing up different dialog screens, all blue in color.

The wisdom of seventh graders: The emergency survival kit

Raymond Chen September 8, 2014 Sep 8, 2014 09/8/14

As a precursor to reading a story about survival, seventh grade students were asked to come up with a list of things they would want to have in their emergency survival kit. Students were specifically instructed to limit themselves to things that were readily available (so no Apache helicopters), and the complete kit had to be something you ...

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