Sure, I like saying "withered hand", but Google took this a bit too far and made me the top hit for the phrase , making me more popular than Jesus with respect to that phrase, at least for now. I apologize to all the people looking for the Miracle of the Withered Hand. Fortunately, MSN Search and Yahoo were not fooled.

Just because you have a thread running at a higher priority level doesn't mean that no threads of lower priority will ever run. Occasionally, I see people write multi-threaded code and put one thread's priority higher than the other, assuming that this will prevent the lower-priority thread from interfering with the operation of the higher-prior...

Last night, the MVP Global Summit broke up by product groups for dinner. I was at the Windows Client product group dinner. The problem for me was figuring out who were the MVPs and who were just Microsoft employees looking for MVPs to chat with. Unfortunately, the people who made up the badges didn't think of making it easy to tell who is who. I s...

Thomas Mahon's English Cut is a glimpse into the world of bespoke tailoring, a world I was completely unaware of prior to his web site. I was particularly fascinated by his description of how to recognise the work of Anderson & Sheppard by inspecting the pockets. It is this attention to detail that really makes the difference between good and...

Back in 1995, I was participating in a chat room on MSN on the subject of device driver development. One of the people in the chat room asked, "Can I write a device driver in Visual Basic?" I replied, "Windows 95 device drivers are typically written in low-level languages such as C or even assembly language." Undaunted, the person clarifi...

Xeni Jardin on Boing Boing reports that the DHS series I mentioned a while back was all an elaborate scam to bilk investors out of millions. (One tip-off has got to be that they changed their domain name from www.dhs.tv to www.dhstheseries.tv. And curiously, their "News" page just says .) Read Ms. Jardin's article for more linkity goodness. ...

One commenter claimed that When the object is first constructed, the reference count should be 0 and AddRef should be called at some point (probably via QueryInterface) to increment the reference count. If you construct your object with a reference count of zero, you are playing with matches. For starters, when the object is created, there re...

The trick of the artificial reference count.

If you try to do too much, you can find yourself in trouble.

In case those coming into town for the 2005 MVP Global Summit were interesting in chatting with me, here's my event diary for this week. (Non-native-English-speaking MVPs can hover over the highlighted words for a translation from slang into "standard American-English".) If you want to be sure to catch me, drop me a line and I'll try to make...