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June 2004 - Posts

What is a C0000005 crash?

In my blog about Dr. Watson I talked about product crashes. What is an example of a crash? How destructive is it? Here’s a simple example. MyFunction takes a string parameter and calculates its length MyFunction ( char * StringParam) { int nlen;

Thirty years ago, computers were quite different

In the old days, we had to use a typewriter. I asked if I could use the ASR-33 teletype machine which connected to our high school PDP-8 computer, but it only printed in UPPER CASE on rolls of yellow paper. Did you ever wonder the origin of the term Carriage
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 6 Comments
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Dr. Watson: Please send in your error report

I bet you’ve seen dialogs similar to this: We at Microsoft refer to this dialog/technology as Dr. Watson (after the famous Sherlock Holmes assistant). Before Watson, computer users would get the BSOD (The Blue Screen of Death) which would just say

Disappearing Window Contents while dragging the mouse

We have heard a couple reports of strange behavior in Visual FoxPro if you click on a thumb button in a scrollbar, drag it up or down a little, then pause for 6 seconds or so. The contents of the window would disappear, leaving a blank editing window.

Designing User Interface for car keys

Here at Microsoft we have people called Program Managers (PMs) whose job is to design a product. They’re the ones that make a feature usable to the customer. A remote keyless entry car fob is quite useful. It’s essentially a wireless short
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 13 Comments
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Start using XML and XSLT to create HTML

Tonight at the Seattle Visual Foxpro user group meeting Richard Stanton gave a great presentation of the new reporting features of VFP9, which is currently available in beta . The question came up about how to use XSLT to create HTML from XML. I said
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 17 Comments

Blogs get 300 hits per hour: Visual FoxPro can count.

I wanted to get a picture into my blog, which isn’t run by my web site. It actually gets posted to 2 URLs: http://blogs.msdn.com/calvin_hsia or at http://weblogs.asp.net/calvin_hsia I can view and edit my entry in HTML, so I just added an IMG HTML
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 17 Comments

Styrofoam Peanuts

I like the convenience of shopping online. Not only are there lots of goodies available, but it’s easy to jump from store to store with a couple keystrokes. However, it’s very hard to tell if the ordered product is shipped in packaging filled
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 21 Comments
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I want my own email! MSN Premium

My 7 year old daughter Wendy has been clamoring for her own email account, among other things (like her own cell phone). She’s been using a computer for years, and has been using my old web server laptop as her main machine, mainly to surf kids
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 98 Comments
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Independence Day for blogging

Since July 4 th is nearing, I thought it would be appropriate to start my independent blog. In this first entry, I’ll add a few pointers to prior entries that I made to our VSData team blog. Solving a customer problem is my blog narrative describing an
 
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