This morning my wife (whom I love and adore) woke me up at 3:00 AM with an urgent question. "Hey!" she said, shaking me awake. "Is 19 prime?" ... Like a fool, I answered her. "Yes. Yes it is." Off she went. This is a true response, but...

I was watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas and I was struck by this rhyme (from the song "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch:") You're a nauseous super naus! You're a dirty crooked jockey, and you drive a crooked hoss -- Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole...

The dice game Yahtzee takes thirteen turns. Each turn involves rolling a set of five dice (with two possible rerolls, the player having the option to reroll only a subset of the dice), then marking one of thirteen boxes and scoring points according to...

It's sometimes difficult to explain to people what my job actually is. "I test Windows sound." "Cool. How does that work?" A product like Windows has a lot of components that interact with each other. If everything works, the user doesn't know that...

When solving Project Euler problems I frequently need to iterate over prime numbers less than a given n . A Sieve of Eratosthenes method quickly and easily finds the small prime numbers; there are more complicated methods that find larger prime numbers...

Working on Windows, I install Windows a lot. This means a lot of my customizations have to be re-applied every time I install. To save myself some time I created a script which applies some of them. Last time I showed how to set the desktop wallpaper...

Working on Windows, I find myself installing Windows a lot. I find that I like to change a lot of the settings that Windows offers to non-default values . (That is, I'm picky.) I have a script which automates some of these things, which I add to...

Please help to welcome my colleague fellow Windows Sound team test dev Yuk Lai Suen to the blogosphere! Yuk Lai's first post discusses the utility of manual testing . Yuk Lai Suen http://blogs.msdn.com/b/yuk_lai_suen/

A question came in today about the Beep(...) API 1 not being able to set the frequency of the beep that was generated. In order to confirm that it worked I whipped up a quick sample which would take the frequency (and duration) on the command line. Source...

There are a handful of Problems (with a capital P) which occur over and over again in programming. One of them is Logging. It is incredibly convenient to use the variadic printf function to log strings with values of common types embedded in them:...

Most device drivers these days have signatures which allow the operating system to validate that the driver files have not been tampered with since the author sent them out into the world. It is still possible to run into an unsigned driver. If you...

Last time I wrote about how to query audio endpoint properties . This time, a few words about WAVEFORMATEX structures. WAVEFORMATEX is a variable-sized structure - it can be as small as a PCMWAVEFORMAT or larger than a WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE. If the...

In 2012, World Chess Champion Viswanathan Anand will attempt to defend his title aqainst challenger Boris Gelfand. This is a very unusual match in that both players are fairly old by World Chess Champion contender standards. I decided to see just how...

Last time we examined the "Disney princess" status of Belle from Beauty and the Beast . This time I attempt to give an exhaustive list of all Disney princesses together with a very short summary of their status. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937...

Is Belle a Disney princess? The case in favor As is clearly established in the opening monologue, the male lead is a prince. Only his outward form is temporarily changed by the nasty enchantress who entraps him into refusing shelter (as if this...

In August 1878 Sam Loyd published this mate in two and dedicated it to a friend of his named Wheeler: Mate in two; Black to move and mate in two; Selfmate in two; Black to move and selfmate in two While the mates appear to stand up, the problem...

Source and binaries (amd64 and x86) attached. Pseudocode: CoCreateInstance(..., &pMMDeviceEnumerator); pMMDeviceEnumerator->EnumAudioEndpoints(..., &pMMDeviceCollection); for (each device in the collection) { pMMDevice->OpenPropertyStore...

We have talked about some of the volume APIs Windows exposes . We have also talked about what it means for a volume control to be linear in magnitude, linear in power, or linear in dB . We have also talked about how to read IAudioMeterInformation...

Last week's Car Talk question was again of mathematical interest - it dealt with palindromic numbers on a car's odometer. (This is not the first palindromic odometer question they've done.) Read Car Talk's "Tommy's Drive to Work" puzzler question ...

Lady Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace is credited with being the first computer programmer. The short version: her associate Charles Babbage gave a lecture on his Analytical Engine in Italy; an Italian engineer wrote up a report on his lecture...

Car Talk's puzzler of the week has some mathematical interest. See Car Talk's transcript of the question. In brief, we are given the equation... (12 + 144 + 20 + 3√4) / 7 + 5(11) = 9 2 + 0 (which holds true, by the way) ...

We have talked about some of the volume APIs Windows exposes . We have also talked about what it means for a volume control to be linear in magnitude , linear in power , or linear in dB . The attachment to this blog post contains: An app I wrote...

Last time we talked about the different Windows Audio Session APIs for setting volume. Let's talk a little about what volume means. For purposes of illustration, let's take our signal to be a full-scale square wave: Incidentally, the answer to...

The formula for square numbers is easy to remember: s n = n 2 There are also triangular numbers, pentagonal numbers, hexagonal numbers, and in general k -gonal numbers. These have formulae too... for example, triangular numbers: t n = n ( n + 1) / 2 ...

Windows has four different volume settings for any given piece of audio; they are all applied simultaneously. For example, if one of these settings is muted, you will not hear the audio, even if the others are turned up to "full". Here they are, from...