The Old New Thing

You have to free memory with the same allocator that allocated it: Logical consequences

September 7, 2006 Sep 7, 2006 09/7/06

Raymond Chen

Everybody should know by now that you have to free memory using the same allocator that you used to allocate the memory. If you allocate with then you have to free with ; if you allocate with then you have to free with . Once you've internalized this rule, you can use it to draw other logical conclusions. Consider: When I call the ...

In case of fire, go to lunch

September 6, 2006 Sep 6, 2006 09/6/06

Raymond Chen

Late one morning, the fire alarm went off at work. Everybody dutifully filed out of the building and waited for the all-clear signal. A few of us looked at each other and said, "Let's go to lunch." "I'll drive." "Shotgun...

You already know what your target architecture is (or at least you should)

September 6, 2006 Sep 6, 2006 09/6/06

Raymond Chen

Sometimes the questions I see make me shake my head in wonderment. How do I determine programmatically what processor architecture my program was compiled for? I want the x86 version of my program to behave differently from the ia64 version. Is there some API I can call? Note that this person isn't asking whether the program is running ...

Just change that 15 to a 1

September 5, 2006 Sep 5, 2006 09/5/06

Raymond Chen

It would be nice and easy to just change that 15 to a 1. If only it were that simple. In the case described in that article, it's not that a single operation was attempted fifteen times in a loop. Rather, the fifteen operations were scattered all over the program. Suppose, for example, that the network operation was "Get the attributes ...

I think I've just broken the internet

September 4, 2006 Sep 4, 2006 09/4/06

Raymond Chen

On our internal blogging discussion mailing list, John Kennedy explained that he was trying to set up a video blog but somehow he ended up including the entire video into his RSS feed. He managed to fix the problem, but apologized: If the internet is broken, it was my fault. That was funny enough, but Keith Combs chimed in with some ...

You're white. Do you want to be in my friend's soap opera?

September 1, 2006 Sep 1, 2006 09/1/06

Raymond Chen

What does a Mandarin-speaking American woman in Beijing do? If you're Rachel DeWoskin, you serendipitously wind up the star of a daytime Mandarin-language soap opera called Foreign Babes in Beijing, a show that takes all the Western stereotypes (from the Chinese point of view) and milks them for all their melodramatic worth. (They probably ...

On the unanswerability of the maximum number of user interface objects a program can create

September 1, 2006 Sep 1, 2006 09/1/06

Raymond Chen

The answer to the question "What is the maximum number of window classes a program can register?" is not a number. Most user interface objects come from a shared pool of memory known as the "desktop heap". Although one could come up with a theoretical maximum number of window classes that can fit in the desktop heap, that number is not ...

The wisdom of seventh graders: Contributions to class discussion

August 31, 2006 Aug 31, 2006 08/31/06

Raymond Chen

(In the continuing sporadic series on the wisdom of seventh grade students.) My friend the seventh grade teacher once had to deal with a class that had gotten out of hand by assigning the students a short essay in which they had to address three questions: One of the more disruptive students answered the questions thus...

The dialog class goes under the sneaky name WC_DIALOG

August 31, 2006 Aug 31, 2006 08/31/06

Raymond Chen

An anonymous commenter wanted to know how to create a dialog box with . The window class for dialog boxes is . I'm not quite sure why anybody would want to create a dialog box this way, but there you have it...

How do you wash soap?

August 30, 2006 Aug 30, 2006 08/30/06

Raymond Chen

Steve Makofsky wondered, "How do you throw out a garbage can?". Along similar lines, I always wondered how you washed soap...