The Old New Thing

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.

Calling the irony patrol

March 3, 2004 Mar 3, 2004 03/3/04

Raymond Chen

I don't speak Dutch, so I went of course to a Dutch search engine, www.vinden.nl. And upon my arrival I was greeted with a pop-up ad offering me a pop-up blocker. There's something wrong about that...

And we will build a processor with… ONE MILLION TRANSISTORS!

February 22, 2004 Feb 22, 2004 02/22/04

Raymond Chen

Insert pinky.

How do we decide what features make it into a product?

January 30, 2004 Jan 30, 2004 01/30/04

Raymond Chen

David Lemson has an excellent article titled How do we decide what features make it into Exchange?. Although he's talking about Exchange specifically, the general principles apply to many products...

Blog going on autopilot for a while

January 26, 2004 Jan 26, 2004 01/26/04

Raymond Chen

I will be out of town for a few weeks, so I have set my blog on autopilot. There will still be an article every weekday at 7am Pacific time (assuming the autopilot machine doesn't suffer a power outage or something), but I won't be around (much) to respond to comments...

Fixing security holes in other programs

January 21, 2004 Jan 21, 2004 01/21/04

Raymond Chen

Any crash report that involves a buffer overrun quickly escalates in priority. The last few that came my way were actually bugs in other programs that were detected by Windows. For example, there were a few programs that responded to the LVN_GETDISPINFO notification by overflowing the LVITEM.pszText buffer, writing more than LVITEM.cchTextMax...

What tools should I assume everybody has?

January 21, 2004 Jan 21, 2004 01/21/04

Raymond Chen

My code samples assume you are using the latest header files from the Platform SDK (free download), the one that includes support for Win64. If you have an older SDK then you won't have various new data types like UINT_PTR and INT_PTR and should just use UINT and INT. I write code that is Win64-compliant as a matter of course since all code ...

What's old is new again… well it's still old

January 11, 2004 Jan 11, 2004 01/11/04

Raymond Chen

The wonderful people who ran blogs.gotdotnet.com, as a parting gift, migrated all the old content into this blog. They're awesome, aren't they...

It's called "proofreading", give it a shot why don't you

January 8, 2004 Jan 8, 2004 01/8/04

Raymond Chen

Like everybody else, I was checking out the new MSN home page and I clicked over to the tour. And right there as their top headline in the sample web page, it says, "Wierd items of the future". Ahem. It's spelled w-e-i-r-d. And on all of the MSN properties, like local city guides, you can see MSN's new motto: "More Useful Everyday". Um, ...