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I used the wrong mouse for nearly an entire day. There are a good number of computers in my office, but they all funnel through to two sets of mice, keyboards, and monitors. One set is connected to the machine I use for day-to-day activities; the other set is connected through a switch box to a collection of machines which I used for testing and a...

The organizers of TechDays 2008 Portugal have decided to lower their standards and invite me to speak at their conference in Lisbon, which by an amazing coincidence takes place during the same week as my appearance at XV Semana Informática do Instituto Superior Técnico (though fortunately not the same day). You don't need to attend...

Why doesn't Microsoft bundle third-party programs? Yes, it has been done in the past, but the results were hardly a slam dunk success. Who ports the software to 64-bit Windows? (Answer: Me, personally. I spent a good chunk of the year 2000 porting millions of lines of code to 64-bit Windows. Just for fun, I did a on a couple of the "gifts" th...

It seems that whenever there is a technology conference, there's a decent chance that somebody will ask me via email or a comment whether I'm going. The default answer to Are you going to this conference? is No. You may find it hard to believe, but going to conferences around the world is not part of my job. My job is to sit in front of a compute...

I watched with a twinge of sad recognition Scoble's hissy fit when his blog didn't show up correctly in Bloglines because it was the classic application compatibility problem, just shifted to the world of Web 2.0. (I don't know what Web 2.0 means, but since nobody else who uses the term knows what it means either, I'm at least in good company.) I...

I left the story of the return of the dead home desktop computer with a puzzle. When I plugged the monitor back into the original computer, it showed a snapshot of the screen at the time the monitor was unplugged. The computer itself continued operating, but the screen never updated. The frozen image remained until the power was turned off to the ...

I brought my dead home desktop computer to the office so I could fiddle with it after work while surrounded by large quantities of geek equipment that could step in to assist. I tried to use a power supply from another computer in a sort of computerish version of jump-starting a car, but it was a hopeless endeavour because the cables on the power...

My office is in the same hallway as the programmer and program manager responsible for the Processes tab in Task Manager. (Of course, they are responsible for a bunch of other stuff too; it's not like 100% of their days are dedicated to Task Manager!) I happened to be passing by just as this particular bug popped up on their radar. It went somethi...

The computer I bought not a year and a half ago decided to keel over last week. When I push the power button, the power light goes on, the drives spin up, but there is nothing out the video card and not even a reassuring beep from the power-on self test. I've disconnected all the external peripherals as well as all the IDE devices, and no change. ...

Mark Russinovich pointed out that if you let users run arbitrary programs, they can circumvent policies. This is actually not surprising, because policy is not the same as security. Shell policies control how Explorer and other shell components behave, but that's just blocking the front door. For example, there is a shell policy to prevent the us...