This upcoming Sunday features an event that means absolutely nothing to people outside the United States: The Super Bowl. I call it an event because it is more than simply a football game. It's an American institution. Even people who think a nose guard is a piece of safety equipment will watch the game, or at least pretend to be interested in it...

The ironic thing about fixing a bug, or at least once I mention on this web site that I fixed a particular bug, is that people immediately complain that I didn't fix some other bug. One school of complaint believes that cosmetic bugs should be fixed first: "You suck. I mean, look at these egregious cosmetic bugs. If you can't get even those righ...

I post this entry with great reluctance, because I can feel the heat from the pilot lights of the flame throwers all the way from here. The struggle with the network interoperability problem continued for several months after I brought up the topic. In that time, a significant number of network attached storage devices were found that did not imp...

If you happen to catch me, say by stopping by my office if you happen to work at Microsoft, I'd be happy to sign your copy of my book. (There's no need to set up a formal book signing appearance in building 9; just stop by my office any time.) One of the things you don't realize as a fan waiting in line at a book signing is that when you get...

Now that computer security grabs headlines, the crackpots are drawn to it. This means that the security folks are innundated with dubious vulnerability reports and revolutionary computer designs. Today's story is one of the "revolutionary computer designs" category. I have developed a complete solution to computer security. Construct one case ...

Ah, the ISA bus...

If vertical strips are better, why do toolbars use horizontal strips? An early version of the toolbar control first made its appearance in Windows 3.0, and in those days, screen resolutions were low and toolbar buttons were small. Horizontal or vertical didn't really matter. Ten bitmaps, each 16 × 16, at 4-bit color, comes out to one ...

London's Transport Museum commissioned a gorgeous interactive map called The Real Underground which lets you see two of the many versions of the world-famous London Underground Map, as well as a street map, and switch among them to see how the two schematics agree with actual geography. I wasted way too much time playing with the Real Undergrou...

The Windows file has a switch whose name would lead you to believe that it sets the maximum amount of memory that Windows will use. But that's not what it does; the name is misleading. What the flag really does is set the maximum physical address that Windows will scan in search of RAM. If your physical memory map contains discontiguous chunks ...

Tuesday was not my finest hour. Towards the end of the work day, I noticed that my coat was nowhere to be seen. I distinctly remember putting it on the back of my chair, but it's not there now. And where are my keys? After checking all the likely places (and several unlikely ones) in my office, I realized that we had gone out to lunch in my car, ...