The Old New Thing

Why does the Resource Compiler complain about strings longer than 255 characters?

March 19, 2004 Mar 19, 2004 03/19/04

Raymond Chen

As we learned in a previous entry, string resources group strings into bundles of 16, each Unicode string in the bundle prefixed by a 16-bit length. Why does the Resource Compiler complain about strings longer than 255 characters? This is another leftover from 16-bit Windows. Back in the Win16 days, string resources were also grouped ...

The car with no user-serviceable parts inside

March 18, 2004 Mar 18, 2004 03/18/04

Raymond Chen

For the first time, a team of women is challenged to develop a car, and the car they come up with requires an oil change only every 50,000 kilometers and doesn't even have a hood, so you can't poke around the engine. To me, a car has no user-serviceable parts inside. The only times I have opened the hood is when somebody else said, "...

Why is the line terminator CR+LF?

March 18, 2004 Mar 18, 2004 03/18/04

Raymond Chen

This protocol dates back to the days of teletypewriters. CR stands for "carriage return" - the CR control character returned the print head ("carriage") to column 0 without advancing the paper. LF stands for "linefeed" - the LF control character advanced the paper one line without moving the print head. So if you wanted to return the print ...

Ännu skriver jag inte bra

March 17, 2004 Mar 17, 2004 03/17/04

Raymond Chen

I was exchanging e-mail with one of the people I will be visiting while I'm in Uppsala [link repaired 10:43pm]. and we wrote in double-translation, first in Swedish, with English translation beneath it. But eventually he gave up and wrote exclusively in English. I went back to my previous dual-language message and found a few pretty ...

More on the AMD64 calling convention

March 17, 2004 Mar 17, 2004 03/17/04

Raymond Chen

Josh Williams picks up the 64-bit ball with an even deeper discussion of the AMD64 (aka x64) calling convention and things that go wrong when you misdeclare your function prototypes...

On a server, paging = death

March 17, 2004 Mar 17, 2004 03/17/04

Raymond Chen

Chris Brumme's latest treatise contained the sentence "Servers must not page". That's because on a server, paging = death. I had occasion to meet somebody from another division who told me this little story: They had a server that went into thrashing death every 10 hours, like clockwork, and had to be rebooted. To mask the problem, the server ...

Why do text files end in Ctrl+Z?

March 16, 2004 Mar 16, 2004 03/16/04

Raymond Chen

Actually, text files don't need to end in Ctrl+Z, but the convention persists in certain circles. (Though, fortunately, those circles are awfully small nowadays.) This story requires us to go back to CP/M, the operating system that MS-DOS envisioned itself as a successor to. (Since the 8086 envisioned itself as the successor to the 8080...

Still more creative uses for CAPTCHA

March 16, 2004 Mar 16, 2004 03/16/04

Raymond Chen

I want to say up front that I think CAPTCHA is a stupid name. CAPTCHA stands for "Computer-Aided Process for Testing..." something something. Why do people feel the urge the create some strained cutesy acronym for their little invention? Anyway, it has already been noted how spammers are getting around these tests by harvesting a practically-...

How do I convert a SID between binary and string forms?

March 15, 2004 Mar 15, 2004 03/15/04

Raymond Chen

More than you probably wanted to know about how SIDs are represented in memory.

Senators are really good at stock-picking

March 15, 2004 Mar 15, 2004 03/15/04

Raymond Chen

A Georgia State University study shows that U.S. senators have an uncanny knack for picking stocks that outpace the overall market. Professor Alan Ziobrowski's analysis of senators' financial disclosure data found that over a period of six years, the lawmakers outperformed the market by 12 percent. Professor Ziobrowski seems ...