The Old New Thing

Beware the Image File Execution Options key

December 19, 2005 Dec 19, 2005 12/19/05
Raymond Chen
Beware the Image File Execution Options key (more). Its power can be used for evil as well as for good. Its intended use is to force a program to run under a debugger regardless of how it is launched (and secondarily to alter how the system treats the program). It's handy if you need to debug a program "in the wild" rather than under the ...

The Dead Sea Scrolls are coming to Seattle

December 16, 2005 Dec 16, 2005 12/16/05
Raymond Chen
Coming to the Pacific Science Center in September 2006 the Dead Sea Scrolls, "considered by many experts to be the most significant archaeological find of the twentieth century". Tickets went on sale yesterday. Volunteer opportunities also available...

When hyperthreading is enabled, all the processors are virtual

December 16, 2005 Dec 16, 2005 12/16/05
Raymond Chen
A common problem when answering technical questions is that people sometimes ask a question that can't or shouldn't be answered because it is based upon a misunderstanding. What's particularly frustrating is when they insist that you answer their question as posed, even when you try to explain to them that their question is itself flawed. It...

A note to headhunters: Check your links

December 15, 2005 Dec 15, 2005 12/15/05
Raymond Chen
If you're going to try to recruit me, you might want to check that the links in your email actually work. Just sayin'. I'm going to mock you regardless, but you should at least make me have to work for it...

You probably don’t want to run programs directly off your USB memory drive

December 15, 2005 Dec 15, 2005 12/15/05
Raymond Chen
You probably wouldn't want to run Windows or applications directly off your USB memory drive, even if you could. The reason is that the solid-state memory used by these drives support only a limited number of write cycles per block. (Originally measured in the thousands, though I'm led to believe that it's gone up since then.) Most software ...

Whole lotta cranking going on

December 14, 2005 Dec 14, 2005 12/14/05
Raymond Chen
Slashdot covered hand-cranked radios and other electronica a while ago. I keep an old-model Freeplay flashlight in the trunk of my car. It sort of fits the whole energy-counter-culture ethos, since I drive an early-model Toyota Prius. Freeplay is a South African company, and one of my South African colleagues pointed out that the Freeplay ...

On the ambiguity of uniqueness

December 14, 2005 Dec 14, 2005 12/14/05
Raymond Chen
The MSDN documentation for says [T]he implementation of GetHashCode provided by the String class returns unique hash codes for unique string values. This is another case of ambiguous use of the word "unique". The intended meaning is "for each string value, the same hash code is returned". Even though "unique" means "one and only one...

We Microsoft bloggers do talk to each other occasionally, y’know

December 13, 2005 Dec 13, 2005 12/13/05
Raymond Chen
Every so often, somebody will spam all the Microsoft blogs with a survey or a plea for a job or some other boilerplate message. Don't think you're fooling anyone. It's not like each blogger lives in a separate world and never talks to anyone else. In reality, we exchange information quite freely and even occasionally get together—usually...