The Old New Thing

Why do folders like “My Pictures” come back after I delete them?

November 23, 2004 Nov 23, 2004 11/23/04
Raymond Chen
Some people are offended by the special folders like "My Pictures" and "My Music" and delete them, only to find them being re-created. What's going on? Windows itself is okay with you deleting those folders. Some corporations, for example, remove those folders from their employees' machines because they don't want the employees looking at ...

When people ask for security holes as features: World-writable files

November 22, 2004 Nov 22, 2004 11/22/04
Raymond Chen
If I had a nickel each time somebody asked for a feature that was a security hole... I'd have a lot of nickels. For example, "I want a file that all users can write to. My program will use it as a common database of goodies." This is a security hole. For a start, there's an obvious denial of service attack by having a user open the ...

The various ways of sending a message

November 19, 2004 Nov 19, 2004 11/19/04
Raymond Chen
There are several variations on the SendMessage function, but some are special cases of others. The simplest version is SendMessage itself, which sends a message and waits indefinitely for the response. The next level up is SendMessageTimeout which sends a message and waits for the response or until a certain amount of time has elapsed...

Am I sorry or not?

November 18, 2004 Nov 18, 2004 11/18/04
Raymond Chen
One of the consequences of the New Internet World Order is that it is very easy to set up a web site like www.sorryeverybody.com and equally easy to set up a response like www.notsorryeverybody.com. This state of affairs clearly calls out for some sort of competition between the two. At dinner last night, someone suggested that there should ...

Poking at diploma mills: Kennedy-Western University

November 17, 2004 Nov 17, 2004 11/17/04
Raymond Chen
I enjoy poking around diploma mills. Especially the ones that spam my inbox. Like Kennedy-Western University, which describes itself like so: Since 1984 Kennedy-Western University (KWU) has provided distance and online degree programs to over 30,000 students. KWU is one of the largest non-accredited online universities in the United States...

How do I break an integer into its component bytes?

November 17, 2004 Nov 17, 2004 11/17/04
Raymond Chen
Warning: .NET content ahead. For some reason, this gets asked a lot. To break an integer into its component bytes, you can use the BitConverter.GetBytes method: int i = 123456; byte[] bytes = BitConverter.GetBytes(i); After this code fragment, the byte array contains { 0x40, 0xE2, 0x01, 0x00 }. Update 11am: The endian-ness ...

Exploiting the inattentive

November 16, 2004 Nov 16, 2004 11/16/04
Raymond Chen
The makers of a certain major brand of detergent which I will not name (but which for the purposes of this discussion will be called "Snide") appears to take every step to exploit inattentive customers. A box of Snide detergent powder comes with instructions indicating that for a normal-sized load, you should use 3/8 cup of detergent; for a ...

What is this Xerox directory doing in Program Files?

November 16, 2004 Nov 16, 2004 11/16/04
Raymond Chen
If you go snooping around, you may find an empty directory. What's that for? This directory is being watched by Windows File Protection, because it needs to protect the file should it ever show up. (Why does the directory have to exist in order for Windows File Protection to be able to watch it? I'm told it's a limitation of the Windows ...

Asking questions where the answer is unreliable anyway

November 15, 2004 Nov 15, 2004 11/15/04
Raymond Chen
Here are some questions and then explanations why you can't do anything meaningful with the answer anyway even if you could get an answer in the first place. "How can I find out how many outstanding references there are to a shared memory object?" Even if there were a way to find out, the answer you get would be instantly wrong anyway ...