The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
The parameters to PostQueuedCompletionStatus are not interpreted
Larry Osterman mentioned this almost in passing quite a while ago, that the parameters to are not interpreted by the operating system. Well, obviously the first parameter, the handle to the completion port, is interpreted as the handle to the completion port. But the other parameters, , , and are not interpreted at all. Even though they have names, the names don't mean anything. Whatever values you pass for those three parameters merely pop out of when the notification packet makes it to the head of the queue. Why do the parameters have names if the names don't mean anything? Because the operating system i...
Being nominated for the Nobel Prize isn't as big a deal as it sounds
Occasionally, somebody will use the fact that they were nominated for the Nobel Prize as some sort of proof that they are a qualified or well-respected person. Except that it proves no such thing. This isn't like the Academy Awards or the Pulizter Prize for which receiving a nomination means that you are one of a handful of finalists. For the Nobel Prize committee, nomination is just the first step, and there is no restriction on how many people can be nominated. In particular, the list of people authorized to submit nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize includes "members of national assemblies and government...
We should just get rid of that stupid middle tier
One of our line-of-business applications sometimes gets very heavily loaded, and several times a day, when you try to issue a query or update a record, you'll get the error message, "Unable to contact middle tier. (other technical gibberish goes here)". Whenever this happens, I like to amuse myself by shouting "Stupid middle tier! We should just get rid of it. It's always unresponsive." Of course, this is a joke along the lines of changing that 15 to a 1. The system follows the standard three-tier model. Getting rid of the middle tier won't actually fix anything. But if the error message keeps blam...
Das Leben der Anderen
A few weekends ago I finally got around to watching the movie Das Leben der Anderen. (English: The Lives of Others.) Apparently movies about the former East Germany get screen time in the States. Go figure. I'd been away from conversational German for a long time, but I was rather pleased that I was able to follow some parts without having to consult the subtitles. Though those parts didn't last long. Eventually, they'd use too many words whose meaning I couldn't guess from context, or they'd talk so indistinctly that I couldn't make out the words, or they'd just plain talk too fast and my internal parsing bu...
Microspeak: The forcing function
At Microsoft, you'll hear the phrase "forcing function" and it won't be in reference to differential equations or to user interface design. Rather, it means a set of circumstances that forces a decision to be made or which forces an action to be taken that previously had no hard deadline. Example: "The impending Y2K threat served as a forcing function for many companies to upgrade their hardware."
Suggestion Box 3
Post suggestions for future topics here instead of posting off-topic comments. Note that the suggestion box is emptied and read periodically so don't be surprised if your suggestion vanishes. (Note also that I am under no obligation to accept any suggestion.) Topics I are more inclined to cover: Topics I am not inclined to cover: You can also send feedback on Microsoft products directly to Microsoft. All the feedback gets read, even the death threats. Suggestions should be between two and four sentences in length. As you can see, there are hundreds of them already, so you have three seco...
Another chapter in Swedish political hypocrisy (2007 edition)
A few years ago, Gudrun Schyman, then-leader of Sweden's left-wing party, Vänsterpartiet ("The Left Party"), was forced to resign after it was revealed that she had been cheating on her taxes for at least five years, specifically by claiming fake deductions. This was particularly ironic because, as the left-wing party, Vänsterpartiet is heavily pro-taxation. The latest news from Sweden comes from the opposite end of the political spectrum. The far right-wing party Sverigedemokraterna ("The Sweden Democrats"), which has an anti-immigrant platform, have complained that 10% of immigrants live on governm...
You're not my manager, so I'm not going to ask how high when you tell me to jump
This happens a lot. I'm minding my own business and then I start getting nag mail from somebody I've never heard of. It usually is marked "High Priority" and the content has lots of boldface and wording that makes it sound like the world is going to end tomorrow. (Pretend "elephant"† is some new buzzword.) URGENT - ACTION REQUIRED Your component has not completed its Elephant review. Elephant-readiness is a release criterion. You must visit http://elephantready/?id=16384 and fill out an Elephant compliance form by the end of the week. When you go to the web site, it asks you to confirm a few pages o...
The unidentified award
I have in front of me a small bag of a trail mix type of concoction. On the bag it proudly proclaims, "Award Winning Snack". First of all, there's a missing hyphen. (It should be "Award-Winning Snack" since "Award-Winning" is a phrasal adjective. The snack won an award. The award isn't winning a snack.) But what award is it? There is no mention of it on the bag or on the company's web site, so I called them. (Update: I checked again a few weeks later and now it says so.) The product won the 2006 Automatic Merchandiser Reader's Choice Product of the Year for Salted Snack of the Year. Automatic Merchandiser is ...