The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
I mean, come on, these are laptops
Last year, Weekend America (co-hosted by former Seattleite Bill Radke—we miss you, Bill!) did a story on the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, which calls itself PLOrk. It's an interesting experiment, but computer music doesn't really move me. It's not the computer-ness that bugs me (I was fascinated by music played on Gameboys, after all) but rather the lack of traditional musicality. That said, the chord that opens the piece on online gambling creeps me out. Not because of the piece itself, but because it is dangerously reminiscent of the chord played at the Tulalip Casino, a steady synthesized triad playe...
Whenever there is a coordination problem, somebody says, "Hey, let's create a process!"
Whenever there is a coordination problem, somebody says, "Hey, let's create a process." Now you have two coordination problems. I see this over and over, and paradoxically the people who create a process for managing a coordinating problem come off looking like proactive problem-solvers who get ahead of the problem. They're the go-getters, the people who look at each problem as an opportunity for continuous improvement. All that great management buzzword stuff. It doesn't matter whether or not the process actually works, because failure is an orphan, and besides, nobody follows up a year later to see whether yo...
Volunteers help save fruit from home fruit trees from going to waste
It's the season where people with fruit trees in their yard are drowning in fresh fruit, be they pears, apples, plums, whatever. It's not long before you find yourself desperately looking for people to give it away to, having pretty much run out of things you can make plums into. This is where Community Fruit Tree Harvest steps in. (Coverage in The Seattle Times and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. There's also Lettuce Link for donating produce from your home garden.) The volunteers at Community Fruit Tree Harvest will visit your house and pick the fruit from your tree, donating it to local food banks. Every...
Does creating a thread from DllMain deadlock or doesn't it?
Let me get this out of the way up front: Creating a thread from is not recommended. The discussion here has to do with explaining the behavior you may observe if you violate this advice. Commenter Pete points out that "according to Usenet" creating a thread in is supposed to deadlock, but that's not what he saw. All he saw was that the thread entry procedure was not called. I'm going to set aside what "according to Usenet" means. Recall how a thread starts up. When you call , a kernel thread object is created and scheduled. Once the thread gets a chance to run, the kernel calls all the functions with the ...
Belated follow-up: Mike Goodspaceguy Nelson running for public office, again
Undeterred by his failure to win a Senate seat last year, Mike Goodspaceguy Nelson once again ran for King County Council. I can't bring myself to listen to his appearance on the local public radio station (fortunately, he wasn't running in my district). You can read his and opponent Dow Constantine's candidate statements on the King County Elections Web site. I stumbled across a candidate questionnaire that the Historic Seattle Preservation Foundation submitted to all of the candidates for King County City Council, and comparing Michael Goodspaceguy Nelson's response with the response from mainstream can...
Knock knock. Who's there? Not you any more.
One of my many favorite Dilbert cartoons is also one of the earlier ones. It's the first strip reprinted in this article. It may not actually have happened, but I was told that that one project many years ago replaced its lead manager. While noteworthy, this sort of thing happens often enough that people take it in stride. What put it into a higher category, however, was that the email that announced this change at the top was sent while the outgoing manager was out of the country on vacation. One can imagine the now-former manager's surprise upon returning to the office. "Dum di dum, catching up on email, he...
The Great Muffin Heist of '07
Earlier this month, there were no muffins to be found anywhere on Microsoft campus. Somebody stole the Muffin Truck!
The Internet Explorer pop-up blocker follows guidelines, not rules
Here's a question that came in from a customer (paraphrased): Hello, we are developing an ASP.NET application and are running into problems with the pop-up blocker introduced in Windows XP Service Pack 2. Where can we get a full description of the rules that control whether a pop-up will be blocked so we can make sure our pop-ups are let through? There is no full description because that would make the pop-up blocker useless. Suppose a formal description were available. Somebody studies the formal description and finds a loophole in the pop-up blocker and exploits it. (Indeed that is precisely what t...
Somebody actually took the time to translate my book into Japanese, it appears
I have no idea who they are (since I can't read Japanese), but hatena appears to be some sort of Japanese social bookmarking site, and I'll often find hits from them in my referrer logs. One of the members found a newly-issued Japanese translation of my book, which opens up a whole new audience to my obnoxious personality. Stumbling across the Japanese edition was a bit of a surprise. I mean, yeah, the book contract has some paragraphs about translations, but seriously, who actually expects their book to be translated? That's just standard book contract boilerplate stuff. What next, a movie deal?