The year-end link clearance is here! You may have noticed that the link clearances are getting shorter and shorter. I may have to cut back to only one link clearance per year.

• Not Even Close: The State of Computer Security. James Mickens once again dazzles the audience with his brilliance.
• It Was Never Going to Work, So Let’s Have Some Tea. The dazzlement continues.
• What’s the deal with the repz prefix on the ret instruction? Spurious repe and repne prefixes are also used by Transactional synchronization extensions to alter memory access instructions. The Memory Protection Extensions prefix a repne on call and jxx instructions to describe their effect on MPX registers, and it uses the repe prefix on specially-encoded nop instructions to encode the new MPX instructions.
• The history of Space Cadet Pinball
• Compatibility issues like this is one of the reasons that as a general rule, Windows considers DLL injection and API hooking to be unsupported.
• Performance guy Rico Mariani revisits 64-bit-ness in Visual Studio and elsewhere.
• To most people, Für Elise is one of Beethoven’s most well-known works for solo piano. In Taiwan, however, it means bring out your trash!
• Nearly a decade ago, I read with fascination this exposé of (since-defunct) Noka Chocolate. One thing I took away from it is that chocolatiers are quite open about where they get their chocolate from. Or at least, all reputable chocolatiers. Anyway, the Dallas Food blog is at it again with chocolate: Mast Brothers: What Lies Behind the Beards. Quartz picked up the story and did their own fact-checking. Spoiler alert: It all checks out.
• Brahms Listening Guide. The formatting is horrible, but it’s packed with detail.

And the new obligatory plugs for my appearances on Channel9:

• The increasingly inaccurately-named Defrag Tools
  • The Defrag Tools crew pop into my office for a chat.
  • The Defrag Tools crew take me to the Microsoft Archives.
  • Part Two of the visit to the Microsoft Archives was unusable because the microphone audio stopped recording. But here’s a summary of what we discussed: Actimates, the Windows 95 ship party, and um something else I can’t remember. But basically it was me retelling stories that were inspired by the stuff we saw in the room. There was very little if any new information. So I don’t feel too bad that the episode was lost.
• The also somewhat inaccurately-named One Dev Minute
  • Error reporting in Windows
  • Why is Alt+F4 the hotkey to close a window?
  • The Windows 96 ship party. (There was a lot of talk about the Windows 95 ship party because of the twentieth birthday of Windows 95.) I’m extra proud that this one is exactly one minute.

The idea is that the One Dev Minute team come to my office every so often and I spend an hour or so answering around ten questions they bring to me. We’ll see how long this will go before they or I (or the audience) gets sick of it.

Bonus chatter: This article [warning: autoplaying audio advertisement] contains the caption “This edition of the Microsoft Encarta digital encyclopedia came on massive laserdiscs.” I can’t tell if they took us literally or they are just continuing the joke. That is actually a novelty display box. The box is empty. There was no monster-sized laserdisc with a custom laserdisc player. Also, the title of that linked article is incorrect; I’ll take responsibility for that one because I was being glib in my chatter. (I didn’t realize that I was going to be quoted on a news site.) I’ll clear it up in a future Dev Minute.