When I heard this story from Swedish Radio, it struck me as the sort of object that would exist in the imaginary world of Harry Potter. Raymond's bad translation follows: Pen can help dyslexics With today's cheaper and cheaper microelectronics, it becomes possible for young inventors to produce new products without a lot of resources. A new i...

Most people who care about such things know that you can press Ctrl+Alt+Del twice from the Welcome screen and sometimes you will get a classic logon dialog. (Note: "Sometimes". It works only if the last operation was a restart or log-off, for complicated reasons that are irrelevant to this discussion.) The ability to do the double-Ctrl+Alt+Del wa...

Sorry to all you PDCers who stopped by the Fundamentals Lounge to see me. The scheduling software that the PDC organizers cooked up is, um, "suboptimal" and listed me for Tuesday 11.30a–2.30p instead of 2.30p–5.30p. During the early afternoon shift, I was actually in the Hands-On Lab. But I'll be in the Lounge on Thursday after my talk ...

Jim Nayder of The Annoying Music Show pops by NPR studios every so often—hey, guys, if you changed the locks, this might stop him—whereupon he tortures the general public with musical offenses that should be outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. Most recently, he offered a series of reinterpretations of the works of Elvis Presley. What'...

Sometimes, I am asked why there is no single version of Windows that contains everything. Instead, as you move up the ladder, say, from Windows XP Professional to Windows Server 2003, you gain server features and lose workstation features. Why lose features when you add others? Because it turns out no actual customer wants to keep the w...

While waiting for the Ninth and Tenth Doctors to reach the States, I was tipped off to some animated Dr. Who episodes on the BBC web site. These are really well done and managed to slake my Doctor cravings for a little while longer. In particular, Richard E. Grant's second turn as the somewhat Earth-obsessed Time Lord in Scream of t...

One of the important distinctions between mutexes and the other synchronization objects is that mutexes have owners. If the thread that owns a mutex exits without releasing the mutex, the mutex is automatically released on the thread's behalf. But if this happens, you're in big trouble. One thing many people gloss over is the WAIT_ABANDONED re...

The FOR command has become the batch language's looping construct. If you ask for help via FOR /? you can see all the ways it has become overloaded. For example, you can read the output of a command by using the for command. FOR /F "tokens=*" %i IN ('ver') DO echo %i The /F switch in conjunction with the single quotation marks indicates that t...

Whereas Eric Carter will be signing his book (co-authored with another Eric) at the PDC. I have no book of my own to sign, but will be happy to sign the Erics' book if you ask me to! You can catch me in the Fundamentals Lounge pretty much the whole time. There have been some changes to my talk since I wrote about it last time. The lecture sty...

Why does the function exist when there is already the perfectly good function ? Actually, you know the answer too, if you sit down and think about it. Winsock was originally developed to run on both 16-bit Windows and 32-bit Windows. Notice how the classic Winsock functions are based on window messages for asynchronous notifications. In the...