September 2018

A lack of species sensitivity when serving pizza to guests

Raymond Chen September 17, 2018 Sep 17, 2018 09/17/18

In the wildlife documentary A Day at the Fire Station, Mr. Vesuvio the fox thanks the pig fire fighters for saving his pizzeria by serving them lunch. Lunch consists of a pizza with various toppings: Tomato, anchovies, basil, and bacon. Mr. Vesuvio may want to leave off the bacon next time...

What defines an old-style common dialog?

Raymond Chen September 17, 2018 Sep 17, 2018 09/17/18

Going back into the Before Time.

Why does the Zune HD have the message “For our Princess” on the inside of the case, and why is she a princess?

Raymond Chen September 14, 2018 Sep 14, 2018 09/14/18

Inside the Zune HD case is engraved the message For our Princess. The message is a tribute to an administrative assistant on the Zune team who passed away during development of the project. She gained the nickname Princess from a group she worked in before joining the Zune team. Another administrative assistant on the team dubbed herself ...

Raising the colon off the ground

Raymond Chen September 13, 2018 Sep 13, 2018 09/13/18

There's a fine typographical detail in the Windows 8 TDBN. See if you can spot it. In the clock, it says 7∶00. Not 7:00. The colon between the hour and minutes has been raised slightly. People that care a lot about these things prevailed upon the development team to make this small refinement to the clock on the TDBN as well as the ...

Anything is a soldering kit if you’re brave enough: The MOnSter 6502

Raymond Chen September 12, 2018 Sep 12, 2018 09/12/18

Eric Shlaepfer wrote So, I made a thing. A really big thing. Really big and really crazy. What he created was a working transistor-scale replica of the MOS 6502 processor. Its name: MOnSter 6502. There's something amazing about debugging at the transistor level...

How do I get the system to run my program in this very special way?

Raymond Chen September 12, 2018 Sep 12, 2018 09/12/18

A customer registered their program to be run automatically under conditions not important to the story. They found, however, that the program didn't work because the program was written with an application framework that looks for configuration files in the current directory, but the system wasn't setting the current directory properly. They ...

Le Chatelier’s principle in action: Notifications

Raymond Chen September 11, 2018 Sep 11, 2018 09/11/18

Some time ago, a configuration change was made to the Windows repo that caused some people (such as me) to receive hundreds of notifications a day related to a process known as the git train. The git train is a process which merges changes between branches. It gets its name from the concept of the train. Anyway, each time the git train did ...

How can I conditionally compile based on a preprocessor macro value, while ensuring that the macro is correctly spelled?

Raymond Chen September 10, 2018 Sep 10, 2018 09/10/18

Continuing on the extremely sporadic topic of stupid C preprocessor tricks. It is common to have preprocessor macros that control compile-time behavior. C++11 has std::enable_if to conditionally remove functions and template specializations from consideration, and C++17 adds if constexpr to allow statements to removed conditionally. Removing ...

Removing the <CODE>TerminateThread</CODE> from a DLL that needs to shut down a helper thread at unload

Removing the `TerminateThread` from a DLL that needs to shut down a helper thread at unload

Raymond Chen September 7, 2018 Sep 7, 2018 09/7/18

Once more we undertake the exercise of designing the TerminateThread out of some code. The customer had an instrumentation toolchain. What you did was take your object code and sent it through an instrumentation tool, and that tool patched your object code so it could instrument things of interest. You then linked the modified object ...

What does it mean for a window to be Unicode?

Raymond Chen September 6, 2018 Sep 6, 2018 09/6/18

The IsWindowUnicode function reports whether the current window procedure expects Unicode window messages. What specifically does this mean? It means that messages like WM_CHAR will report characters as Unicode code units rather than as ANSI code units. Okay, so what determines whether a window procedure receives Unicode messages...

The Old New Thing

September 2018 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing