Some years ago, a group different from the one I worked in invited me to "volunteer" to help them with serious problems they were having with their product. They asked to "borrow" me for one week so that I could magically resolve all their issues. I wasn't really that familiar with their product, and I certainly didn't know how it worked internall...

The Seattle Times reports that the National Weather Service is inviting suggestions from the public on what to call the recent windstorm. They're baffled because "the storm didn't fall on a holiday." Huh? The storm blew in on the evening of the 14th, but its effects weren't really felt until the morning of the 15th, and the first dark night for ...

The documentation for the function states that the first parameter is a "pointer to the buffer containing the version-information resource returned by the function." Some people, however, decide to bypass this step and pass a pointer to data that was obtained some other way, and then wonder why doesn't work. The documentation says that the fir...

We interrupt this religious holiday for an important commercial announcement. As a special Christmas present, my new best friends at Addison-Wesley sent me an advance copy of the dead-tree edition of my book. (Obligatory plug: Order it from Amazon. You know I want you to.) One commenter asked whether my book would be available electronically. O...

Last time we looked at the format of 32-bit version resources, but I ended with the remark that what you saw purported to be the resources of but actually weren't. What's going on here? The resources I presented last time were what the resources of should have been, but in fact they aren't. A common mistake in generating 32-bit resources is...

Slate's Explainer column answers questions about current events. Sometimes they do it multiple times, as they did when I asked them how to pronounce the name Pinochet and they said Pee-no-CHAY, then later corrected themselves with pin-oh-CHET, and then again re-corrected themselves with Yes. Yesterday, the Explainer provided a selection of th...

Last time we looked at the format of 16-bit version resources. The 32-bit version is nearly identical, except that everything is now in Unicode. Each node is stored in the following structure (in pseudo-C): In words, each version node begins with a 16-bit value describing the size of the nodes in bytes (including its children), followed by a 16...

I return to the extremely sporadic series on resources with a description of the version resource. You don't need to know how version resources are formatted internally; you should just use the version resource manipulation functions , , and their friends. I'm providing this information merely for its historical significance. Version resources c...

Puget Sound Energy has a service status page where they update how things are going in the power restoration process. The repair crews (some from as far away as Kansas) are working 40-hour shifts with eight hours' rest between shifts. (That article is from a snowstorm a few weeks ago. A manager is quoted as saying. "I've been in this industry 30 ...

"I bet somebody is looking to get a really nice bonus for that feature." A customer was having trouble with one of their features that scans for resources that their program can use, and, well, the details aren't important. What's important is that their feature ran in the Startup group, and as soon as it found a suitable resource, it displayed a ...