{"id":643,"date":"2014-06-26T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-26T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2014\/06\/26\/for-honor-for-excellence-for-pizza\/"},"modified":"2014-06-26T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-06-26T07:00:00","slug":"for-honor-for-excellence-for-pizza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20140626-00\/?p=643","title":{"rendered":"For Honor, For Excellence, For Pizza"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hacker News member <a href=\"http:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/user?id=citizenlow\">citizenlow<\/a> recalls the time <a href=\"http:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=4782531\"> I went over after hours to help out the Money team debug a nasty kernel issue<\/a>. They were running into mysterious crashes during their stress testing and asked for my help in debugging it.\n I helped out other teams quite a bit, like <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2005\/11\/14\/492483.aspx\"> writing a new version of Dr. Watson for the Windows&nbsp;98 team<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/channel9.msdn.com\/Shows\/Defrag-Tools\/Defrag-Tools-5-Autoruns#time=04m50s\"> writing a new version of the MSConfig tool based on a sketch on a bar napkin<\/a>. And for a time, I followed the official policy for moonlighting to make sure everybody understood that I was doing work outside the boundaries of my official job duties.\n When the Money folks asked me for help, I told them that before I could help them, they would have to help me fill out some paperwork.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Who will you be working for? Microsoft Corporation. <\/li>\n<li>Where will you be doing the work?     Office XX\/YYYY on Microsoft Redmond Campus. <\/li>\n<li>When will the work begin and end?     Begin on YYYY\/MM\/DD at 5pm, ending YYYY\/MM\/DD at 11pm. <\/li>\n<li>How much will you be paid for this work? <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> The Money folks were not sure how to answer that last question, since they didn&#8217;t have any formal budget or procedures for hiring an outside consultant, much less any procedures for hiring one <i>from inside the company<\/i>.\n I told them, &#8220;Just write <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2012\/01\/11\/10255331.aspx\"> <i>One slice of pizza<\/i><\/a>.&#8221;\n Nobody from the Personnel department seemed to notice the odd circumstances of this moonlighting request; they simply rubber-stamped it and put it in my file.\n The crash, it turns out, was in Windows itself. There was a bug in the <a href=\"http:\/\/technet.microsoft.com\/en-us\/magazine\/2008.09.windowsconfidential.aspx\"> special compiler the Languages team produced to help build certain components of Windows&nbsp;95<\/a> which resulted in an incorrect address computation under a particularly convoluted boundary condition. The Money folks had merely stumbled across this bug as part of their regular testing. I notified the appropriate people, and the Windows team applied a workaround in their code to tickle the compiler into generating the correct code.<\/p>\n<p> As I recall, the pizza was just fine. It was just your average delivery pizza, nothing gourmet or anything. Not that it had to be, because <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2006\/12\/01\/1184734.aspx\"> I wasn&#8217;t there for the pizza<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hacker News member citizenlow recalls the time I went over after hours to help out the Money team debug a nasty kernel issue. They were running into mysterious crashes during their stress testing and asked for my help in debugging it. I helped out other teams quite a bit, like writing a new version of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Hacker News member citizenlow recalls the time I went over after hours to help out the Money team debug a nasty kernel issue. They were running into mysterious crashes during their stress testing and asked for my help in debugging it. I helped out other teams quite a bit, like writing a new version of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}