Showing archive results for 2014

A custom template, or possibly a custom hook function.

The long holiday weekend in the United States means that there are probably going to be a lot of people on road trips. Back in the old days before mobile phones, if you had multiple cars traveling together on a long trip, you had to stay within visible range of each other so that you didn't get separated. And if the car at the end of the convoy ne...

A security report was received that went something like this: A user can bypass file sharing locks by opening a read-only handle to the physical volume containing the file in question. This allows the user to extract the contents of protected files by reading the corresponding sectors directly from the disk. Since this operation requires administr...

A customer liaison asked for assistance in debugging why Internet Explorer frequently stops responding at their customer's site. "We have tried a number of things like clearning the temporary Internet files, disabling add-ons, and resetting Internet Explorer settings. Please let me know if you can provide guidance based on the dump files provided ...

A customer was setting up a file server to which they intended to redirect all their employees' documents. They were concerned about the amount of disk space used by all the Recycle Bins on that server. Is there a fixed default size for the Recycle Bin, or is it based on the size of the disk? Is there a way we can change the default size for the ...

Another round of the semi-annual link clearance. James Mickens section January 2014: This World of Ours I have seen a video called “Gigantic Martian Insect Party,” and I have seen another video called “Gigantic Martian Insect Party 2: Don’t Tell Mom,” and I hated both videos, but this did not stop me from directi...

Today's Little Program locates the × button in the corner of the window and displays a balloon tip pointing at it. We did this some time ago with the help of the message, which is new for Windows Vista. But what if you don't have that message available, say, because you're running on Windows 2000 or Windows XP or (gasp) Windows 9...

The rules of logic no longer apply when you cross the line.

Hacker News member citizenlow recalls the time I went over after hours to help out the Money team debug a nasty kernel issue. They were running into mysterious crashes during their stress testing and asked for my help in debugging it. I helped out other teams quite a bit, like writing a new version of Dr. Watson for the Windows 98 team or ...

Today is another example where the right thing to do is not to answer the customer's question but rather to solve the customer's problem. A customer liaison asked, "What do the registry keys X and Y do? We noticed that they are both read from and written to when you open a common file dialog. Just curious." I replied, "I'm curious as to your curi...