How the design of the C++ language subverts thread safety.

In a comment to one of my earlier entries, someone mentioned a driver that bluescreened under normal conditions, but once you enabled the Driver Verifier (to try to catch the driver doing whatever bad thing it was doing), the problem went away. Another commenter bemoaned that WHQL certification didn't seem to improve the quality of the dri...

The new $20 bills explode when you try to microwave them because of the tracking device embedded behind Andrew Jackson's right eye.

The other night my phone rang just as I discovered that I overheated my pan and the oil was starting to burn. I rushed to the phone, thinking it's the people I had invited to dinner, but no, it was some telemarketer. "Hello, is this Mr. Chen?" "Sorry, can't talk now, my kitchen is on fire." "Oh my God, sorry!" <click> I'll have to ...

In a comment to yesterday's entry, someone asked about the customized icon that appears in the address bar... sometimes. There's actually method to the madness. I was going to write about it later, but the comment (and misinformed answers) prompted me to move it up the schedule a bit. (The originally-scheduled topic for today - the history...

I don't speak Dutch, so I went of course to a Dutch search engine, www.vinden.nl. And upon my arrival I was greeted with a pop-up ad offering me a pop-up blocker. There's something wrong about that.

Okay, I'm about to reveal one of the tricks of Product Support. Sometimes you're on the phone with somebody and you suspect that the problem is something as simple as forgetting to plug it in, or that the cable was plugged into the wrong port. This is easy to do with those PS/2 connectors that fit both a keyboard and a mouse plug, or with ne...

This past weekend I fell into tickets to a Seattle Thunderbirds game. (The Seattle Thunderbirds belong to the "U.S. Division" of the otherwise-Canadian Western Hockey League, one of the three Major Junior Leagues.) I hadn't been to a hockey game since my college days. It was quite enjoyable and I may very well do it again. On the messa...

If you look at the various functions that return s, you'll see that some of them return (like ) and some of them return (like ). You have to check the documentation to see what each particular function returns on failure. Why are the return values so inconsistent? The reasons, as you may suspect, are historical. The values were chosen to be c...

Many people are calling for the abandonment of 16-bit DOS and 16-bit Windows compatibility subsystems. And trust me, when it comes time to pull the plug, I'll be fighting to be the one to throw the lever. (How's that for a mixed metaphor.) But that time is not yet here. You see, folks over in the Setup and Deployment group have gone and visi...