Hey, look at this, we’re just about halfway through the year.
- Mr. Plinkett’s Super Happy Fun Star Trek: The Next Generation Mistakes Video. Is this a super-nerdy video? Yes. Did I watch all of it? Also yes.
- Pangeos Terayacht: An $8 billion Engineering Disaster. Adam Something rips the Pangeos Terayacht (which somehow had 15 minutes of fame) to shreds.
- Stellarium Web Engine is an open-source JavaScript planetarium library. You can play with it online.
- The Value of Check-It-Yourself Science. Theoretical physicist Matt Strassler provides several examples of how you can confirm various facts about the solar system by using direct observation and high school mathematics. For example, he estimates the distance to Jupiter using his eyes, a protractor, and a pocket calculator, and in a similar fashion calculates the distance from the earth to the sun.
- What word begins with “y” and looks like an axe? A deep dive into a children’s ball.
- Taking the deepest possible breath: CathodeRayDude investigates Phoenix Hyperspace, a miniature (Linux-based) operating system which runs a small number of programs and which (here’s the scary part) can live-swap with a running copy of Windows. How did they do this? Maybe you’re better off not knowing. Oh, who am I kidding. Read it and weep.
- Hell never ends on x86: CathodeRayDude investigates HP QuickWeb, and it’s even more insane than Phoenix Hyperspace.
- The Itanic Saga chronicles the history of the ill-fated Itanium processor. If yu want to see more details of the Itanium instruction set architecture, you can read my processor overview.
- Alex Chan investigates the claim that the largest possible PDF is a 381 kilometer square. Turns out you can go bigger. Much bigger.
- Darek Mihocka dives deep into ARM64EC.
- Acquire and Release Fences Don’t Work the Way You’d Expect.
- Do you miss WordPad? Fortunately, the source code was released (MIT license) as a sample app. You can find a copy online.
And the obligatory self-serving plug: It appears that the Windows Dev Docs team created a short link that takes you to a playlist of many of my One Dev Question videos: https://aka.ms/ODQ-RaymondChen.
You have no idea how happy it makes me to know that you watch Red Letter Media and that you’re a trekkie :’)
Darek Mihocka, in his dive deep into ARM64EC recalls Windows RT and writes:
"We already know that Windows RT had no foreign binary support, provided only a limited set of native ARM built-in apps, and required third-party developers to port their applications to ARM if they wanted to run on Windows RT at all. When not enough developers bought in on this (as happened with RT) the OS ended up being of little value to...
I think the intention was for developers to publish their apps through the Microsoft Store, which back then only allowed publishing UWP apps, and I've heard other developers absolutely hated UWP, but it was possible and some apps and games did get ported that way. You're right though, the refusal to accept Win32 apps on Windows RT probably significantly contributed to its demise, since that would have been a trivial porting process for many apps...
How many Win32 apps are written in pure C, at least since the start of the last millennia? Or am I misunderstanding you? Probably…
Well there is a C ABI for UWP stuff too now, I just don’t have any experience with it, but you could check out what SDL does if you’re curious. If you’re targeting Windows though then C++ is always an option and has good interoperability with C, and you can still keep the majority of your codebase as ordinary C in either case. Many Win32 APIs also work fine in UWP.
There's a long history of updating the wordpad sample MFC code to make "interesting" variants. I've even done it myself, thought I don't think I ever published it online. Since the OS does most of the work the resulting apps are super light weight, loading instantly and taking nearly zero space. These days I use metapad ( 94k installed!) for that purpose, though in all honesty it's raw C not MFC so...
that’s https://liquidninja.com/metapad/ for those interested in having a editor of last resort that’s way more functional than notepad but loads just as quickly.
WordPad was once published in the Microsoft Store at product ID
9NBLGGH4V89G(probably as a packaging proof of concept). It lacks file type associations, but perhaps that is preferable so you have to make a conscious decision to run it.So that switch OS on sleep monstrosity. I understood why it used that journal replay method. That's how it protects against trashing NTFS.
The OS is asleep not shut down. If you rearrange any on disk structures bad things. But if you journal the writes and replay them as normal filesystem writes when windows resumes from sleep, it's all good.
In other news, that .efi application is actually smart. You've heard of no deps right? This is...
The thing that's crazy about all this is they made it into an OS when it could have been a simple win32 app (replacing explorer perhaps), as the startup times are almost identical for the linux based "instant on" OS as real windows 7. If they had just made a shell alternative then the boot times would be unchanged (or possibility faster since exlporer.exe is fairly heavy) and switching into it from an already booted...
Even if the Windows was fully shut down, I believe in 2009 Linux NTFS drivers write support was still experimental and dodgy, and could trash the journaling or worse. You were well advised to only treat NTFS partitions as read only from Linux side. So, no matter the status of the Windows OS, it still makes sense to do this delayed write back of the data on Windows side to make sure nothing breaks the...