The Old New Thing

Not getting past the title: This is not the bug you’re looking for

December 17, 2018 Dec 17, 2018 12/17/18

Raymond Chen

The title contains the same word, but that's about the only thing that's the same.

The case of the mysterious LoadLibrary error message after signing in

December 14, 2018 Dec 14, 2018 12/14/18

Raymond Chen

A little screen shot forensics.

How can I programmatically wait until the taskbar has finished booting completely before I create my notification icon?

December 13, 2018 Dec 13, 2018 12/13/18

Raymond Chen

It will let you know.

How can I programmatically wait until the system has finished booting completely before doing my own computations?

December 12, 2018 Dec 12, 2018 12/12/18

Raymond Chen

Your observation of the system mutates the system.

Why doesn’t my lock screen image change after I replace the image file?

December 11, 2018 Dec 11, 2018 12/11/18

Raymond Chen

It got captured when it was set.

When a customer asks for something unsupported, and they promise not to get upset when it stops working, don’t believe them

December 10, 2018 Dec 10, 2018 12/10/18

Raymond Chen

Because they'll be back.

The case of the buffer overflow vulnerability that was neither a buffer overflow nor a vulnerability

December 7, 2018 Dec 7, 2018 12/7/18

Raymond Chen

Not quite knowing how assembly language works, I guess.

Xformer 10: The Atari 800 emulator has gotten a huge update

December 6, 2018 Dec 6, 2018 12/6/18

Raymond Chen

It's over 30 years old, but can still be improved, and it sure did.

How is it that WriteProcessMemory succeeds in writing to read-only memory?

December 6, 2018 Dec 6, 2018 12/6/18

Raymond Chen

Because it tries really hard.

How can dereferencing the first character of a string take longer when the string is longer? I’m looking only at the first character, which should be constant time

December 5, 2018 Dec 5, 2018 12/5/18

Raymond Chen

There's a lot hiding in that O.