The Old New Thing

How my lack of understanding of how processes exit on Windows XP forced a security patch to be recalled

May 4, 2007 May 4, 2007 05/4/07
Raymond Chen
Last year, a Windows security update got a lot of flack for causing some machines to hang, and it was my fault. (This makes messing up a demo at the Financial Analysts Meeting look like small potatoes.) The security fix addressed a category of attacks wherein people could construct shortcut files or other items which specified a CLSID that was...

Unexpected consequences of self-checkout

May 3, 2007 May 3, 2007 05/3/07
Raymond Chen
I heard an interesting report on Marketplace on surprises in the self-checkout lane. Impulse buying is down, and stores have come up with other ways to entice you into buying something you hadn't planned. And it turns out that fears from retailers that customers would cheat at the self-checkout turned out to be misplaced: The reality of the...

Quick overview of how processes exit on Windows XP

May 3, 2007 May 3, 2007 05/3/07
Raymond Chen
Exiting is one of the scariest moments in the lifetime of a process. (Sort of how landing is one of the scariest moments of air travel.) Many of the details of how processes exit are left unspecified in Win32, so different Win32 implementations can follow different mechanisms. For example, Win32s, Windows 95, and Windows NT all shut...

Male perceptions of body image in Taiwan

May 2, 2007 May 2, 2007 05/2/07
Raymond Chen
A few years ago, researchers started with "muscle dysmorphia" and body-image perceptions in the United States and Europe and wondered whether the same problems afflict Taiwanese men. Listen for the results. But don't be confused by the chicken meat (肌肉). Sean Cole interviews Taiwanese pop star A-Mèi for her opinion. I ...

The old-fashioned theory on how processes exit

May 2, 2007 May 2, 2007 05/2/07
Raymond Chen
Life was simpler back in the old days. Back in the old days, processes were believed to be in control of their threads. You can see this in the "old fashioned" way of exiting a process, namely by exiting all the threads. This method works only if the process knows about all the threads running in it and can get each one to clean up when it's ...

Two web sites that read the fine print

May 1, 2007 May 1, 2007 05/1/07
Raymond Chen
On footnoted.org, Michelle Leder reads the fine print in all those SEC filings, focusing on the details that companies try to hide from vigilant eyes. For example, she dug into Carnival Corp's proxy statement and discovered "that Chairman and CEO Micky Arison rang up $343K on his use of the corporate jet last year and that COO Howard Frank ...

Microspeak: Operationalize

May 1, 2007 May 1, 2007 05/1/07
Raymond Chen
Here are a few citations for the word operationalize. A lot of work lies ahead to operationalize this plan. Provide security guidance and tools to help operationalize security for enterprise environments. I thought it meant "carry out" or "put into effect", and then I saw this sentence: Operationalize the demo (get computers configured, ...

Everyone should have a house pianist

April 30, 2007 Apr 30, 2007 04/30/07
Raymond Chen
Last year, a request was sent out to a social mailing list that went something like this: Hi, everybody. My girlfriend is coming to visit for a week, and she's a pianist. Does anybody have a piano they would be willing to let her practice on while she's here? I offered the piano in my living room and gave him the key to my house. I came ...