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April 2005 - Posts

Remembering Chernobyl

It was exactly 19 years ago. Soviet Union was trying, at least in theory, to reach the perfect communist society. Since May 1 (Labor day in USSR) was close, the staff at Chernobyl nuclear plant was rushing to complete one more final test that would serve Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 26, 2005 10:23 AM by AdiOltean | 5 Comments
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Transactions for the masses - Transactional NTFS

There is a new blog on my radar - Malcom Smith started to write about Transactional NTFS here: http://blogs.msdn.com/because_we_can/default.aspx Transactional NTFS (or TxF as we call it here) is a very exciting technology. The idea is extremely simple: Read More...
Posted Monday, April 25, 2005 6:39 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

First hybrid harddrive with NAND flash memory

Now this is wild - a hybrid harddrive that mixes both NAND flash and a spinning disk! The NAND drive is used as a buffer cache for write disk operations. First of all it is an extremely fast read cache (just compare the latencies for flash read with the Read More...
Posted Monday, April 25, 2005 6:12 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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Mark Russinovich started a blog!

It is right here http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/ I can't wait to hear new interesting stories about Windows, now that Microsoft Windows Internals seems to take so much time between editions... Read More...
Posted Monday, April 25, 2005 3:09 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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How online/offline works in a cluster for Physical Disk resources

I was always fascinated about the concept of shared disks in a Microsoft cluster. Fortunately there is a KB article that explains this process in great detail: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;309186 Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 24, 2005 2:01 AM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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Advanced C++ features and Kernel-mode programming don't mix

I was just reading recently a whitepaper from the Microsoft web site, describing how you you should use C++ features in the context of kernel-mode programming. The paper is quite interesting, and can be summarized in a few sentences: If you want to use Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 24, 2005 12:54 AM by AdiOltean | 7 Comments

Puzzle: do you know chemistry?

Here is a very nice puzzle - But unfortunately you have to ressurect a little chemistry knowledge to fully appreciate it... You have two identical test tubes. Both tubes look identical - they both contain colourless, odoreless, aqueous solutions. But Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 21, 2005 11:36 PM by AdiOltean | 10 Comments

Microsoft releases public beta of Data Protection Manager

Data Protection Manager is the first enterprise-level backup product released by Microsoft. It's architecture is quite interesting - it uses a combination of various technologies (Volume Shadow Copies, continuous disk-based backup for quick restore of Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 21, 2005 11:24 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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You can't say that engineers lack a sense of humour...

http://home.cwru.edu/~cdt3/Funstuff/qantas.htm Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 21, 2005 3:52 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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Subtle issues when using predefined accounts

The code below has a small problem - can you spot quickly? const MAX_TEXT_BUFFER = 1024; BYTE pbSid[SECURITY_MAX_SID_SIZE]; PSID pSid = (PSID)pbSid; WCHAR wszDomainName[MAX_TEXT_BUFFER]; SID_NAME_USE snUse; DWORD cbSid = SECURITY_MAX_SID_SIZE; DWORD dwDomainNameSize Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 19, 2005 4:43 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments

Actually there are posts in Brett Shirley's blog...

... but the font is apparently too small. You need a really, really good magnifier to view them... http://blogs.msdn.com/brettsh P.S. Hey Bretty, there are people with thick glasses too :-) and with a burning desire to read your blog. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 19, 2005 3:28 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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Online demo: How to control a nuclear power plant.

If you have nothing to do right now, here is your opportunity to learn how to avoid an accident in a nuclear power plant :-) The control-room operators of the Kärnobyl nuclear power plant are telecommuting and are running the plant through the Web. However, Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 17, 2005 2:55 AM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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NTFS Curiosities (part 2): Volumes, volume names and mount points

In the old days of MS-DOS and Windows 95 you could identify any volume by its drive letter. Things were so easy. But not anymore after we shipped Windows 2000. In W2K you could also have mount points - volumes mounted under certain directories. This feature Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 16, 2005 11:51 PM by AdiOltean | 12 Comments

Puzzle: geometry problem

Here is a fun one: The triangle ABC is isoseceles, with angle (ABC) = angle (ACB) = 80°. We draw now two segments inside the triangle. First, we choose the point D on segment AC such that angle (CBD) is 60°. Also, we choose the point E on AB, where angle Read More...
Posted Monday, April 11, 2005 7:52 PM by AdiOltean | 18 Comments
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Is the Open Source community too religious?

Lately, I've seen more and more fanatical reactions from Linux advocates. "There's an extremist fringe of Linux loonies who hang out on forums and are disrespectful and threatening because you disagree with them," DiDio told ZDNet UK on Wednesday. "That Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 07, 2005 6:33 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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Reuven is here

Reuven Lax (another member of our VSS team) just started a blog no MSDN here . This is good - I'm sure we will see soon all sorts of interesting posts about algorithms and Windows in general... Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 07, 2005 3:10 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

Report: Many users don't understand security terminology

A study performed by AOL (apparently) proofs once again that the average computer user is unfamiliar with the security terminology. Many people don't really know what a trojan is, or what spyware means. Some quotes: A quarter said they knew what "spyware" Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 06, 2005 4:21 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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New experimental pages from the MSN Search team

Someone just told me about two new pages from the MSN Search playground ( http://sandbox.msn.com ). The first page - http://www.start.com/1 - combines a very fast MSN search page with an online RSS reader. The original page is very small, almost 4K, and Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 05, 2005 10:20 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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How to design an indestructible computer

It''s funny to see how people are dealing with computers... http://rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_abuse.shtml But on the other side, I think that it would be an interesting exercise to design an indestructible computer. One that would survive if its owner will Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 03, 2005 11:39 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

COM and .NET: what's wrong with this code?

Can you spot the mistake in this code? Here we implement a CCW-based .NET object. This COM class is exposed as from a certain process (say, a service) to other processes in the system. We implement a simple get/set accessor that receives an array of objects: Read More...
Posted Friday, April 01, 2005 3:34 PM by AdiOltean | 4 Comments
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Psychology trick: See yourself as an outsider

An interesting study in PhysOrg.com presents a different approach to regular psychological roadblocks: view (and judge) yourself as an outsider. Here is the abstract: When people feel they’ve hit a roadblock in reaching a personal goal, such as losing Read More...
Posted Friday, April 01, 2005 2:32 AM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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