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Sep 18, 2006
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Sometimes my psychic powers are weak

Raymond Chen

Why does my MFC program exit unexpectedly? The stack trace at the point we hit goes like this: Thanks. You can already see some of what's going on, but clearly more information is needed. My first psychic suggestion was to examine MFC's message pump to see what causes it to exit. Then follow the money backwards. That's what we want to kn...

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Sep 11, 2006
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If you ask a Yes/No question, make sure the user also knows what happens when they say No

Raymond Chen

I was talking with someone last year who had a gripe about a music organizer program. Suppose you create some playlists and then decide, "Oh, nevermind, I don't like this playlist." You highlight the playlist and click "Delete". You then get a dialog box that asks, "Do you want to move the songs in this playlist to the Recycle Bin?" "Well, no, I d...

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Sep 5, 2006
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Just change that 15 to a 1

Raymond Chen

It would be nice and easy to just change that 15 to a 1. If only it were that simple. In the case described in that article, it's not that a single operation was attempted fifteen times in a loop. Rather, the fifteen operations were scattered all over the program. Suppose, for example, that the network operation was "Get the attributes of thi...

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Sep 4, 2006
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I think I've just broken the internet

Raymond Chen

On our internal blogging discussion mailing list, John Kennedy explained that he was trying to set up a video blog but somehow he ended up including the entire video into his RSS feed. He managed to fix the problem, but apologized: If the internet is broken, it was my fault. That was funny enough, but Keith Combs chimed in with some technical ...

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Aug 30, 2006
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If you work at a company, it's not your computer any more

Raymond Chen

My posting a while back on solving one problem by creating a bigger problem was written from the standpoint of an IT department doing something like tweaking a logon script. I even mentioned that context partway through but clearly didn't highlight it clearly enough. So say you're an IT department and somebody says, "Oh, just install this other p...

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Aug 29, 2006
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As I recall, Germany did not ratify the United States Constitution

Raymond Chen

I remember reading a news report on a court case wherein the defendant claimed protection under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. An interesting angle, especially since the case was being tried in Germany under German law. I may be wrong, but it is my impression that Germany did not ratify the United States Constitution. There...

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Aug 25, 2006
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We know it's insecure, but we want to do it anyway

Raymond Chen

I remember a question from somebody who asked, paraphrasing: We're writing a secure screen saver that the user can interact with. We're going to present the user with various types of information, and if they click on a hot link, we want to launch a web page on their desktop once the user unlocks the workstation. We know it's insecure, but we want...

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Aug 18, 2006
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Applications and DLLs don't have privileges; users do

Raymond Chen

I can't believe you people are actually asking for backdoors. If an end user can do it, then so can a bad guy. In response to the requirement that all drivers on 64-bit Windows be signed, one commenter suggested adding a backdoor that permits unsigned drivers, using some "obscure registry key". Before somebody can jump up and shouts "security th...

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