I'm out today to volunteer with grading student essays. The topic the students were given is one that I suggested: "You have been chosen to design a new elective for your school. Describe what it would be." In a few weeks, you'll learn what the students wrote, but my question for you is what you would propose in your essay. You can answer the ques...

Here's a problem "inspired by actual events": I have a sequential stream that is the response to a request I sent to a web site. The format of the stream is rather messy; it comes with a variable-length header that describes what type of data is being returned. I want to read that header and then hand the stream to an appropriate handler. But t...

As we've seen a few times already (when building context menus and exploring fiber-based enumeration), composition is an important concept in object-oriented programming. Today, we're going to compose two sequential streams by concatenation. There really isn't much to it. The idea is to take two streams and start by reading from the first one....

Many years ago, I saw a Dilbert cartoon that went roughly like this. Frame 1: Supertitle - "Dogbert's guide to project management." Frame 2: Supertitle - "Not a project." Dilbert answers the phone. "Sure, we do that." Frame 3: Supertitle - "A project." Dilbert answers the phone. "No, we don't do that."† I've seen a lot of software projects, ...

The first time I saw the Seattle Symphony's new principal cellist Joshua Roman, it was at a subscription performance of Mahler's Seventh Symphony in June 2006, shortly after the then-22-year-old took the principal's seat from the retiring Raymond Davis. We noticed that there was a new face in the orchestra, and wondered afterwards, "Who was that ...

A customer asked the following question (paraphrased): Does the Windows XP Add/Remove Programs control panel expose a scriptable object model? We want our program to open the Add/Remove Programs control panel and uninstall the programs of our competitors. No, there is no object model for the Add and Remove Programs control panel, and it fri...

Most of the menu item functions such as allow you specify the menu item either by position or by command. Some of them use the and flags. Others separate the search algorithm into a separate flag. Searching for menu items by position is straightforward: The specified position is used as a zero-based index into the menu. In other words, the fir...

I ranted a few years ago about rate hikes disguised as fees or taxes, but Verizon's unabashed deceptive practices still gets me all worked up. Last year, the FCC decided that Verizon didn't have to pay the Universal Service Fund fee any more, but that didn't stop them from charging for it anyway. What galls me is their explanation of the fee the...

Continuing in the extremely sporadic series on the format of resources, today we'll take a look at accelerator tables. This topic is so simple, I'll cover both 16-bit and 32-bit resources on the same day! In 16-bit Windows, the format of an accelerator table resource was simply an array of structures. This array is the same array you would ...

Sometimes people get so caught up in their problem that they forget to ask a question. My customer has noticed that blah blah blah blah, but if they do blah blah, then they get blah blah blah. This is different from blah blah blah, where blah blah blah. But neither is what the customer is expecting, which is blah blah blah. After installing blah b...