Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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Comparing writing specifications to writing code

February 8th, 2006
My colleague who manages to pack his entire office into a single box recently made the switch from program management to programming. I teased him, "So what's it like using an editor without a 'boldface' button?" His response was actually rather insightful. "Writing specifications is like writing a novel. Writing code is like writing poetry...

Apparently I can't take myself anywhere

February 7th, 2006
Upon arriving at the office, I unpack my bicycle bag and remove a crisp new white shirt. I change into my work clothes, and then at 11am, I head to lunch as I usually do. (This is the lunch group that includes JeffDav and occasionally BenCon.) I get a sandwich, sit down, and immediately drip sauce on my brand new shirt. Can't even keep a ...

Viewing function composition as transformation of the domain

February 7th, 2006
A lot of formulas you encounter in computer science can be viewed as function composition. Let's start with the simple problem of rounding integers down to the nearest multiple of some positive constant. The formula for this should be relatively easy for you to produce: round_down(n, m) = floor_div(n, m) * m where returns the largest ...

You know you're in trouble when your channel loses to dead air

February 6th, 2006
When Australian Channel Seven aired a blank screen for 41 minutes [indirect report], you'd think its competition would pick up some viewers. But it didn't. But the glitch did not result in a ratings boost for public broadcaster SBS, with figures showing viewers preferred Seven's blank screen. To Seven's astonishment more than 900,000 ...

Beware of redirected folders, too

February 6th, 2006
Earlier, we learned about roaming user profiles, wherein the master copy of the user's profile is kept on a central server (which for the purpose of discussion I will call the "profile server") and is copied around to follow the user as she logs onto computers throughout an organization. In the comments, many people said that what they really...

Mysterious things Steve Yi has eaten

February 3rd, 2006
I read with some fascination Steven Yi's Mysterious Things I Have Eaten, since I have had four out of five of them myself. And I love the little story he tells about sea cucumber. Kimchee, like lutefisk and surströmming, most likely comes from the days before refrigeration. The acid produced by fermentation preserves (what's left of...

You can't even trust the identity of the calling executable

February 3rd, 2006
A while back, I demonstrated that you can't trust the return address. What's more, you can't even trust the identity of the calling executable. I've seen requests from people who say, "I want to check whether I'm being called from MYAPP.EXE. I'm going to make a security decision based on the result." Although you can do this, all it does is ...

Be careful when interpreting security descriptors across machine boundaries

February 2nd, 2006
While it's true the function can be used to check whether a particular security descriptor grants access to a token, you need to be aware of where that security descriptor came from. If the security descriptor came from another machine (for example, if you got it by calling and passing the path to a file on a network share), calling the ...

The pornography of food

February 2nd, 2006
On the Media picks up on the Harper's Magazine article Debbie Does Salad and chats with Frederick Kaufman, the article's author, on the curious similarity between the way cooking shows and pornographic films present their subject matter. Cooking shows target the 18–35 male, even though these people are unlikely to be cooks themselves...

The military marriage of convenience

February 1st, 2006
The marriage of convenience is alive and well, not that is really a surprise to anybody. I found interesting this story on how some young members of the US military are getting married for purely economic reasons. By getting married, he would get a housing stipend and permission to move off-base. And as his legal wife, she would get health...