The Old New Thing

You can't escape those AOL CDs

May 17, 2005 May 17, 2005 05/17/05
Raymond Chen
One of my colleagues was unpacking one of those $30,000 quad-processor more-memory-than-you-know-what-to-do-with super-server computers. The kind that require their own electrical substation. And it came with an AOL CD. It's like buying a Lexus and finding a 35-cents-off coupon in the glove compartment. Apparently, one of the questions AOL ...

Loading the dictionary, part 4: Character conversion redux

May 16, 2005 May 16, 2005 05/16/05
Raymond Chen
Getting rid of was a big help, but 480ms is still not quite peppy enough. You need to respond to user actions within a tenth of a second for thing to seem responsive. Profiling the latest endeavor reveals that 40% of our CPU time is spent in . Some debugging reveals that ultimately calls but uses it to convert only one or two ...

Loading the dictionary, part 3: Breaking the text into lines

May 13, 2005 May 13, 2005 05/13/05
Raymond Chen
Even after moving the character conversion out of the function, profiling reveals that is still taking nearly 50% of our CPU. The fastest code is code that isn't there, so let's get rid of altogether. Oh wait, we still need to break the file into lines. But maybe we can break the file into lines faster than did. This very simple class...

The Microsoft corporate network: 1.7 times worse than hell

May 12, 2005 May 12, 2005 05/12/05
Raymond Chen
Today I'm going to tell a story from 1996. Why? Because I can. One of the tests performed by Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) was the NCT packet stress test which had the nickname "Hell". The purpose of the test was to flood a network card with an insane number of packets, in order to see how it handled extreme conditions. It uncovered ...

Loading the dictionary, part 2: Character conversion

May 11, 2005 May 11, 2005 05/11/05
Raymond Chen
When you want to optimize a program, you first need to know where the time is being spent. There's no point optimizing a function that isn't actually responsible for your poor performance. For example, if a particular function is responsible for 2% of your CPU time, then even if you optimized it down to infinite speed, your program would...

Loading the dictionary, part 1: Starting point

May 10, 2005 May 10, 2005 05/10/05
Raymond Chen
The first thing we'll need to do in our little dictionary program is to load the dictionary into memory. The format of the dictionary file is as a plain text file, each line of which is of the form Since it was the Big5 dictionary we downloaded, the Chinese characters are in Big5 format, known to Windows as code page 950. Our program will...

Developing a Chinese/English dictionary: Introduction

May 9, 2005 May 9, 2005 05/9/05
Raymond Chen
The other day, one of my colleagues mentioned that his English name "Ben" means "stupid" in Chinese: 笨/bèn/ㄅㄣˋ. (His wife is Chinese; that's why he knows this in the first place.) Knowing that the Chinese language is rich in homophones, I fired up my Chinese/English dictionary program to see if we could find ...

How to query properties of the taskbar

May 6, 2005 May 6, 2005 05/6/05
Raymond Chen
Occasionally, people want to query properties of the taskbar. I don't quite understand why; you should just get on with your life and let the taskbar get on with its life. After all, there might not even be a taskbar, as we discussed last time. But if you really want to know (perhaps you're collecting usability data), here's how: This ...

How do I cover the taskbar with a fullscreen window?

May 5, 2005 May 5, 2005 05/5/05
Raymond Chen
For some reason, people think too hard. If you want to create a fullscreen window that covers the taskbar, just create a fullscreen window and the taskbar will automatically get out of the way. Don't go around hunting for the taskbar and poking it; let it do its thing. As always, start with the scratch program and add the following: ...

When people ask for security holes as features: Stealing passwords

May 4, 2005 May 4, 2005 05/4/05
Raymond Chen
Sometimes people ask for features that are such blatant security holes I don't know what they were thinking. Is there a way to get the current user's password? I have a program that does some stuff, then reboots the system, and I want to have the current user's password so I can log that user back in when I'm done, then my program can resume ...