I just made up that term now because I needed a word to describe the situation where some manager is put in charge of a feature but is not given a staff to implement that feature. This happens more often than you might think, since there are many features that are "horizontal", i.e., features which affect all teams throughout the project. So-called...

On Mark Rosenfelder's Zompist web site I found a series of cultural guides named How to tell if you're ‹nationality›. All of the entries are simultaneously funny and insightful, such as this one from Turkey: A company can fire just about anybody it wants. But it will also hire anybody. For some reason, my favorite is this one fro...

Solving this next problem should be a snap with your nascent psychic powers: I'm trying use to load a resource string with one insertion in it, and this doesn't work for some reason. The string is "Blah blah blah %1. Blah blah blah." The call to fails, and returns . What am I doing wrong? Hint: Take a closer look at the parameter . Hint&...

The IT department here will periodically send out notifications regarding changes to the network infrastructure or updates that are being deployed across the company. One of my colleagues sent me email saying, "Cool, they're using Roman numerals!" It was in response to one particular IT notification that included the following sentence: This upda...

Nobody asked, but I'm going to post it anyway. These are the movies I'm planning on seeing, along with my twisted take on the plot, based solely on the movie description. ¹These movies were chosen in large part to serve as German lessons. ²I have a weak spot for slightly off-kilter Japanese movies set in the modern day. ³Swedish ...

Larry Osterman mentioned this almost in passing quite a while ago, that the parameters to are not interpreted by the operating system. Well, obviously the first parameter, the handle to the completion port, is interpreted as the handle to the completion port. But the other parameters, , , and are not interpreted at all. Even though they have na...

Occasionally, somebody will use the fact that they were nominated for the Nobel Prize as some sort of proof that they are a qualified or well-respected person. Except that it proves no such thing. This isn't like the Academy Awards or the Pulizter Prize for which receiving a nomination means that you are one of a handful of finalists. For the Nob...

One of our line-of-business applications sometimes gets very heavily loaded, and several times a day, when you try to issue a query or update a record, you'll get the error message, "Unable to contact middle tier. (other technical gibberish goes here)". Whenever this happens, I like to amuse myself by shouting "Stupid middle tier! We should just g...

A few weekends ago I finally got around to watching the movie Das Leben der Anderen. (English: The Lives of Others.) Apparently movies about the former East Germany get screen time in the States. Go figure. I'd been away from conversational German for a long time, but I was rather pleased that I was able to follow some parts without having to c...

At Microsoft, you'll hear the phrase "forcing function" and it won't be in reference to differential equations or to user interface design. Rather, it means a set of circumstances that forces a decision to be made or which forces an action to be taken that previously had no hard deadline. Example: "The impending Y2K threat served as a forcing f...