Consider the following code, written in C# just for kicks; the problem is generic to any environment that supports exception handling. Some time later, you find yourself facing an assertion failure from claiming that you are destroying the document while there are still active plugins. But there is your call to , and it's in a block, and the ...

The U.S. cable network TLC is putting on a special episode of What Not to Wear devoted to identifying the worst-dressed couple in America. It so happens that one of my friends knows one of the finalists, so we'll be rooting for them. Or is it against them? Are you supposed to hope that your favorite is in fact the worst-dressed? Or should you be...

NPR interviewed John Reeves, the artist behind a 160-foot-tall mountain of ice in Alaska. The man has a down-home aw-shucks kind of demeanor that I found quite charming. I'm a middle-aged guy that has a lot of time in the winter and a little bit of extra money to play with, so my hobby was to see how big an ice hill I could grow. I started last ...

Today, I'm not writing anything new. Instead, I'm referring you to the series of articles by Ruediger Asche starting with Windows NT Security in Theory and Practice. These articles are quite old but the principles are still sound. Just bear in mind that the newer stuff won't be covered.

Although Windows is centered around, well, windows, a window itself is not a cheap object. What's more, the tight memory constraints of systems of 1985 forced various design decisions. Let's take for example the design of the list box control. In a modern design, you might design the list box control as accepting a list of child windows, each of w...

The Seattle Times ran an excellent series last week on the rise and fall of InfoSpace and its charismatic leader, Naveen Jain, who at one point even used the phrase "cult leader" to refer to himself. To set the tone, and perhaps to serve as a reference while you read the series, here's a list of reported Infospace earnings per share (EPS), b...

A common feature for many applications is to record their screen location when they shut down and reopen at that location when relaunched. If implemented naively, a program merely restores from its previous position unconditionally. You run into usability problems with this naive implementation. If a user runs two copies of your program, the two w...

The weekend of March 12th and 13th, Vegetarians of Washington is hosting VegFest 2005, a festival of vegetarian food. This reminds me of a Time Magazine cover story from July 2002, wherein it was revealed that... In a survey of 11,000 individuals, 37% of those who responded "Yes, I am a vegetarian" also reported that in the previous 24 hours t...

In the operating systems group, we have to take a holistic view of performance. The goal is to get the entire system running faster, balancing applications against each other for the greater good. Applications, on the other hand, tend to have a selfish view of performance: "I will do everything possible to make myself run faster. The impact on th...

If you pass the flag to the function, it will broadcast the message with the wParam equal to the system parameter code you passed. For example, if you call then the system will broadcast the message If there is a window that isn't responding to messages, then this broadcast will hang until that unresponsive window finally resumes respon...