I love it when two unrelated stories conspire to create amusement beyond what each one provided separately. We start with this report from BoingBoing of a man on Craigslist who offered to perform computer maintenance and repair in exchange for second base. (For those not familar with North American high school sexual slang—and that includes m...

Earlier this year, the Advertising Standards Authority (the UK's advertising watchdog) ruled that the use of umlauts in the name of kitchen furniture manufacturer Möben is purely decorative and not intended to mislead consumers into believing that the company is German or Scandinavian. The fact that the name is only one letter away from both...

Now that dual-core processors are gaining in popularity, there has been some confusion over whether a dual-core processor counts as one or two. This discussion of multicore processor licensing may clear things up. The short answer is that a dual-core processor still counts as one processor. For example, Windows XP Professional supports up to two ...

Last year, some friends and I went for dinner at Brouwer's Café, a Belgian pub/restaurant in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. The menu is pub food, which means that everything comes with frites and a choice of several dipping sauces, none of which is ketchup. One of my friends spent some formative years of her life in the Netherlands,...

The purpose of quotation marks is to allow a character that would normally be interpreted as a delimiter to be included as part of a file name. Most of the time, this delimiter is the space. The function uses a space to separate the program name from its arguments. Most programs separate their command line arguments with a space. But the environm...

Last time, I recommended that functions should just crash when given invalid pointers. There's a subtlety to this advice, however, and that's making sure you crash in the right place. If your function and your function's caller both reside on the same side of a security boundary, then go ahead and crash inside your function. If the caller is a bad...

September 30, 2006 is the first Museum Day open to the general public. (Apparently, previous Museum Days were limited to subscribers of Smithsonian Magazine.) You will have to print out the Museum Day Admissions Coupon to get in. Some restrictions apply. Read the fine print. Even the Institute for Creation Research (an actual museu...

Masking a bug just creates a different, harder-to-find, bug.

In an attempt to explain why astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper fainted during a welcome ceremony, ABC News reported The heart of an average person on Earth pumps blood throughout the body. But when an astronaut is in space, Levine explained, the blood remains predominantly in their chest cavity. Because of this, he said, the heart tries to ...

"Isn't DDE all asynchronous anyway?" asks commenter KaiArnold. It's mostly asynchronous, but not entirely. You can read about how DDE works in MSDN, but since it seems people are reluctant to read the formal documentation, I'll repeat here the points relevant to the discussion. The DDE process begins with a search for a service provider. This i...