The Old New Thing

When there's a problem with the platform, you blame the platform, whether it's the platform's fault or not

February 6, 2008 Feb 6, 2008 02/6/08
Raymond Chen
I watched with a twinge of sad recognition Scoble's hissy fit when his blog didn't show up correctly in Bloglines because it was the classic application compatibility problem, just shifted to the world of Web 2.0. (I don't know what Web 2.0 means, but since nobody else who uses the term knows what it means either, I'm at least in good company...

Why did the display become a snapshot of the last time the monitor was plugged into the computer?

February 5, 2008 Feb 5, 2008 02/5/08
Raymond Chen
I left the story of the return of the dead home desktop computer with a puzzle. When I plugged the monitor back into the original computer, it showed a snapshot of the screen at the time the monitor was unplugged. The computer itself continued operating, but the screen never updated. The frozen image remained until the power was turned off to...

Who decides what can be done with an object or a control?

February 5, 2008 Feb 5, 2008 02/5/08
Raymond Chen
This is one of those things that is obvious to me, but perhaps is not obvious to everyone. An object establishes what can be done with it. Any rights granted by the object go to the creator. The creator can in turn grant rights to others. But if you're a third party to the object/creator relationship, you can't just step in and start messing ...

The dead home desktop returns from the dead

February 4, 2008 Feb 4, 2008 02/4/08
Raymond Chen
I brought my dead home desktop computer to the office so I could fiddle with it after work while surrounded by large quantities of geek equipment that could step in to assist. I tried to use a power supply from another computer in a sort of computerish version of jump-starting a car, but it was a hopeless endeavour because the cables on the ...

DLL forwarding is not the same as delay-loading

February 4, 2008 Feb 4, 2008 02/4/08
Raymond Chen
As I noted earlier, when you create a forwarder entry in an export table, the corresponding target DLL is not loaded until somebody links to the forwarder entry. It looks like some people misread this statement to suggest some sort of delay-loading so I'm going to state it again with an example in mind in the hopes of clearing up any ...

Strange bug assignment: Programs are using too much memory

February 1, 2008 Feb 1, 2008 02/1/08
Raymond Chen
My office is in the same hallway as the programmer and program manager responsible for the Processes tab in Task Manager. (Of course, they are responsible for a bunch of other stuff too; it's not like 100% of their days are dedicated to Task Manager!) I happened to be passing by just as this particular bug popped up on their radar. It went ...

The dead home desktop problem returns

January 31, 2008 Jan 31, 2008 01/31/08
Raymond Chen
The computer I bought not a year and a half ago decided to keel over last week. When I push the power button, the power light goes on, the drives spin up, but there is nothing out the video card and not even a reassuring beep from the power-on self test. I've disconnected all the external peripherals as well as all the IDE devices, and no ...

Shell policy is not the same as security

January 31, 2008 Jan 31, 2008 01/31/08
Raymond Chen
Mark Russinovich pointed out that if you let users run arbitrary programs, they can circumvent policies. This is actually not surprising, because policy is not the same as security. Shell policies control how Explorer and other shell components behave, but that's just blocking the front door. For example, there is a shell policy to prevent ...

Even without a nitpicker's corner, I have to worry about nitpickers

January 30, 2008 Jan 30, 2008 01/30/08
Raymond Chen
Even without a nitpicker's corner, I have to worry about nitpickers. I just have to do it in a more subtle way. Here are some examples of changes I've made to upcoming entries in order to forestall nitpicking: What's scary is that I've noticed that I begun pre-emptively nitpicking my own entries while I'm writing them. In the balance ...