Antimail

I just read recently a post on the newsgroups - someone wanted to backup her PST file. The problem is that Outlook keeps this file open all the time, therefore we are unable to just copy this file once in a while. Argh... A cute little script ...

In one of my previous posts I mentioned a simple script to copy a file from a shadow copy. This allows you to access files that are opened exclusively by some application. You won't have enough drive letters... Here I present a similar script (let...

Aaron Stebner noted that it is possible to configure Windows to always use short file names. This is a legacy feature left over from the Windows 95 land. Sometimes, you just have to run some old MS-DOS applications. These apps will get confused about...

Mr Blobby posted an excellent comment in my previous post, outlining in a few words Gödel's proof of incompleteness of arithmetics. This is a mind-boggling result, which essentially states the following: There are certain statements (I would not say ...

Imagine that there might be a real number that contains (in an encoded form) the entire works of Shakespeare. Let's call this number a "Shakespeare number". Can you give an example of an algorithm to generate Shakespeare numbers? [update] The problem...

Several people asked us - why your product is named VSS? After all, VSS stands also for Visual SourceSafe... The short answer: we were never very good at naming. Today, VSS stands for V olume S hadow copy S ervice. But it was not the case in the past...

I just visited a friend yesteday night. Among other things I helped him to clean up his computer from spyware. And, on the spot I came up with a simple solution to ensure that it won't get infected anymore. Beyond the standard provisions (antivirus, etc...

Larry Osterman has an excellent post about threat modeling. I would add a couple of observations, from my own experience. 1) Make sure that you include short definitions for all concepts that are you using, even if they are very basic. Even if it might...

There are various numeric limits, imposed either in the OS or in the specific shadow copy provider. Here is a table that summarizes all the numbers. Note that the limit below is per volume, not per system. Maximum number of shadow...

Yes, I know already what you've been thinking, but this post isn't about programming languages. It's about search. We live today in an ocean of information. Too much information we can ever cope for. But, in some sense this information is strongly-typed...

If you like CMD programming, here is a challenge for you: write a CMD batch file that solves the Hanoi problem. You start with these folders: and you must end up with this state: You probably know the rules of the Hanoi problem. Mapped in the command...

The fourth edition of Microsoft Windows Internals (formerly known as Inside Windows) is available in the stores: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735619174/qid=1106614530/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/002-2739301-3965610 Dave Solomon and Mark Russinovich...

An excellent photo blog: http://www.paginiweb.com/blog/ The text is in Romanian - but the images speak by themselves...

Not sure if this is real, but it looke like some people love computers way too much...

... atenţie! Echipa de Common Language Runtime vine in Bucuresti pentru recrutări. Pentru mai multe detalii, vedeţi blog-ul lui Jason Zander (dânsul este Product Unit Manager în echipa de CLR).

With a loud thud, Rory throws all graphologists in the dumpster: For those of you who don’t know, “graphology” is a pseudo-science with about as much validity as astrology or reading tea leaves. The idea is that all sorts of personality traits and characteristics...

Recently, there is a flux of new Web Services specifications that are addressing low-level engineering needs, for example the speed of the communication, or even the network protocol. Let's see two of them: 1) SOAP over UDP . The name is self-describing...

If you think that formatting a drive will wipe out its contents, think again... http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,88118,00.html

Rob Earhardt had some interesting notes on Hungarian notation, and I thought I'll chime in. By the way, I am not against Hungarian, and I actually use it in my C++ code. It was harder to get rid of this habit when when I started programming in C# :-)...