2010 Q1 link clearance: Microsoft blogger edition

It's that time again: Sending some link love to my colleagues.

• Names and file system filters. Even if you aren't interested in file system filters (and you probably aren't), the discussion of names is very interesting, particularly in light of the confusion over hard links and the difference between a file and its names.
• Mark Russinovich creates 16 million handles in a single process. Famous last words: "16 million handles should be enough for anybody." And learn that a handle isn't really an index into an array. (If handles were kept in an array, then the kernel would find itself having to reallocate a a 16-million-element array.)
• Larry Osterman digs into the etymology of the Microspeak term giblet.
• Joey deVilla points out a little-known Bing search operator which shows all domains registered at a particular IP address.
• Shawn Steele explains pseudo-locales, which look an awful lot like l33t. Michael Kaplan begs you not to call it ps-ps.
• Michael Kaplan sarcastically observes that Notepad is the apparent premiere tool of UNIX shell script authors throughout the world. (I wish I could get away with being as snarky as Michael.)
• DPI emulation normally kicks in when the logical DPI is set above 120. Kam VedBrat explains how you can enable DPI emulation at lower DPI levels.
• The ESL Assistant team blog introduces, well, the ESL Assistant, a Web page to assist non-native speakers of English with their writing. "Introduce" is a misnomer here, since the ESL Assistant has been around since 2008. Too bad nobody knows about it.
• Eric Lawrence's IEInternals discusses The User Agent String: Use and Abuse. Eric's blog is full of good in-depth stuff like this, like Understanding Domain Names in Internet Explorer, which discusses the difficulty of trying to figure out where the important part of the domain name is.
• The Larry Osterman trifecta is now in play. This time, he shares his own take on the cost of updating everything.
• Tina Wood gives a glimpse behind the curtain of Life at Microsoft: The truth revealed. There's also a second episode.
• Adrian Marinescu discusses the heap manager. Silviu Calinoiu discusses the fault-tolerant heap. Richard Johnson presents [ppt] some implementation details of the low fragmentation heap (from a security perspective).
• What happens when the network goes down. (Related to What happens when the power goes out.)
• Janne Mattila repurposes Internet Explorer 8's InPrivate Filtering as an ad-blocker.
• Eric Lippert has his own exercise in psychic debugging. (Answer.) Understanding this puzzle means that you don't need to have this subtlety of the Zip sequence operator explained to you.
• How to enable the light sensor on your laptop and what it gets you.
• The NTdebugging blog has examples of all sorts of debugging techniques. It has a kernel-mode focus, but there's user-mode stuff mixed in there occasionally.
• Alan Page builds on Eric Sink's article Why we all sell code with bugs (long version) with his own explanation of why bugs don't get fixed.
• I asked Rico Mariani to share his story about the clever way he addressed unmanaged heap fragmentation back in the late 1990's. Turns out he did it years ago and I missed it.
• Shawn Hargreaves tells a story about a bug whose effect was so awesome it became a feature.
• Over on the fontblog, Kevin Larson debunks an Internet myth about ltteer scrmbaling.
• On the Windows Installer Team Blog, Hemchander discusses Windows Installer and the Restart Manager, and way at the bottom is information on how you can make your program survive an update-triggered reboot.
• Keith Combs points us to the surprising showdown between a shark and an octopus. (Older grainier video.) Was this the inspiration for Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus? (Oh, and the octopus had help.)
• Brandon Paddock demystifies The so-called "God Mode": It's just part of the plumbing that drives the Start menu and Control Panel search functions. We saw something like this before, when people took the Copy To and Move To toolbar buttons and turned them into context menu items. In both cases, you're using something in a manner it was not designed for or tested for, so if it doesn't work, well, nobody promised that it would.
• Roberto Alexis Farah shows us another cool debugger command: !findstack.
• danah boyd posted the speaker notes for her SXSW keynote Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity. She gave a longer version of the same talk to Microsoft employees two weeks earlier.
• Larry Osterman explains what's up with the Beep driver.