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Commenter nolan reminisces about an old Windows 95 bug in the networking layer that crashed if a string was exactly 13 characters long. "So for the past 10 years or so, I've been wondering exactly how one could write code with that bug. Any bug that weird has to have a great story behind it." I don't know what the story behind it is, but i...

Command line parsers are stricter than human beings. The computer cares about what you typed. If you type something else that superficially resembles what you want, but is not actually what you want, then you won't get what you want, even though it sure looks like what you want. I covered a special case of this topic earlier when I described sma...

Time for the semi-annual link clearance. And, as always, the obligatory plug for my column in TechNet Magazine:

I will occasionally note that users don't read error messages; they just click Cancel. And the phenomenon isn't just restricted to naïve users. Even programmers ignore error messages. All they see is "Blah blah blah an error occurred." For example, there's this message that appeared on a peer-to-peer discussion group: I tried to submit...

Everybody has probably heard about some project where management decided to motivate testers and programmers by rewarding testers for finding bugs and programmers for fixing them. In the absence of high ethical standards, this can devolve into the situation known to Dilbert fans as I'm gonna write me a new minivan. I experimented with this idea...

Commenter Daniel wonders why a flashing taskbar results in a fullscreen console returning to windowed mode. I didn't know the answer to this, but I formulated a guess, and I was ready to just post my guess. (Because everything I write is just conjecture anyway. Informed conjecture, but still.) But I had some time, so I went spelunking through th...

I wrote some time ago that the window manager generates spurious messages in order to let programs know that the mouse has entered the window even if the reason was a window hierarchy reshuffle rather than a physical motion of the pointing device. But some people have noticed that that explanation fails to account for all the messages that are ...

Here's another sentence that's so loaded with buzzwords and buzzphrases I'm not sure what language it's written in. I just want to have creative control over how my audience can interact with me without resorting to complex hacking in a way that is easy to explain but ups our blogging audiences sats to a new level that may also stimulate a devel...

Although the International Electronic Commission established the term kibibyte for 1024 bytes, with the abbreviation KiB, Windows Explorer continues to use the abbreviation KB. Why doesn't Explorer get with the program? Because nobody else is on the program either. If you look around you, you'll find that nobody (to within experimental error) ...

Some years ago, I went out to dinner with a group of friends to a Chinese restaurant, and when the check was delivered to the table, one of my friends looked at it and handed it to me. "It appears to be written in some sort of secret code." It was written in Chinese. I pointed out that they probably chose the worst possible code in the world, ...