Chris Jackson's Semantic Consonance : Miscellaneous

The Secret to Power App Compat Debugging

Chris Jackson — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:57:44 GMT

If you come to me for advice about how to become a debugger, chances are that I’m going to give you a couple of must-read reference books, an then tell you to start paying attention. Because, unless you’re drastically more lucky than I am, stuff is probably breaking on you all the time. While a lot of problems just go away, if you let it just go away, you’ve just squandered an opportunity to debug something.

The only way to become a master at debugging is to practice. A lot.

But there’s a level even above master debugger – being somebody able to get to the bottom of most every issue (eventually – hey, even for the best, it can take time, lots and lots of time). What’s that level? The Power Debugger. Somebody who dispenses with the need for time, and just fixes things quickly because there is no alternative.

How do you reach that level?

Simple.

Have a 4-year-old.

Four year olds don’t care about the challenges application compatibility. They just want their games to work, and they are quite vocal when they don’t. They look at you thinking, “why can’t you fix this? Aren’t you supposed to be able to do this? Can’t you see this is bothering me?” Oh, and then the cry. And yell. And cry. Great.

Fortunately, the solution for pre-school games is typically rather easy. For reasons that are completely beyond comprehension to me, it turns out that many developers of games for pre-schoolers assume that I want my 4-year-old to be an administrator on my computer.

RunAsAdmin, and we were on our way. Optimal solution? No. But you have to power debug with a 4-year-old.

So that leads me to this:

If you develop commercial games for pre-schoolers, I will help you debug your application so it works for standard users for free. But you have to promise to run your developer workstation either as a standard user, or as a protected administrator (that’s right, turn UAC back on) on Windows Vista or later.

Every application should run as a standard user. But games for children should have run for standard users even on XP.

I live in airplanes.

Chris Jackson — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 07:22:11 GMT

The end of the year is approaching, and I normally like to do a bit of a review. This year, there was one statistic that really stood out for me. I have a car that is a blast to drive, and I love to drive in general. So, I’m not sure exactly how this happened:

Gah! That’s with only 4 international trips (2 of those being quick jaunts to Canada)!

The Windows SDK Breaks the New TR1 Extensions in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Until you Repair It, That Is)

Chris Jackson — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 01:21:59 GMT

One of the main uses for my blog is to share those little annoyances that I spend hours or days solving and spare you the “fun” of going through this yourself. So, even though this isn’t really about application compatibility, which has kind of become the main theme here, it will still hopefully help save somebody some time (thanks to search engines).

I recently picked up a new laptop (Lenovo T61p, FWIW) and got everything set up according to my typical usage scenarios. I was then going about building some code, and discovered that in the transition, several of my builds had broken.

Weird, I thought. We recently moved some MFC updates and the addition of TR1 extensions to C++ from a separate feature pack into Visual Studio 2008 SP1. I was getting all of the MFC extension bits. I was missing some of the TR1 extension bits. I indexed all of the header files, and they just plain weren’t there. The shared_ptr class, for example, lived in zero header files on my hard drive.

What happened?

The fix, of course, is to just re-install Visual Studio 2008 SP1. But what broke it?

It turns out that the Windows SDK lays down files not only in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1\Include, but takes the liberty of laying down (older) files in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\include. Yep – it up and clobbered the SP1 header files and broke my builds.

So, if you install the Windows Vista SP1 / Windows Server 2008 SDK, you may want to re-install VS2008 SP1 afterwards…

Let's (Geek) Motor

Chris Jackson — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:47:23 GMT

The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!

Does my geekiness have no bounds? (Apparently not.) Now I just need to find somebody who has WNDPROC plates...

Regardless, you can't possibly have forgotten (since I am compelled to remind you) that I'm in the running to participate in the Windows Vista Bloggers' Panel hosted by Mark Russinovich at TechEd IT Pro week. There's still time to register! Just visit http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2008/itpro/registration/regprocess.mspx to sign up to attend. Looking forward to seeing a number of you there - we've got some great new content in store for you!

Conference Review Scores and Broken Keyboards

Chris Jackson — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:28:27 GMT

I had a bit of a bummer morning back at MMS 2008. I woke up early (fortunately the conference was in Pacific and my body was in Central, so it was less torturous than getting up early normally is for me) and went down to get set up nice and early. I decided to add a bunch of extra demos at the last minute, you see, so I figured I could use the time.

Unfortunately, the presenter who was going to have the room after me decided to get there even earlier than I did.

So I got to sit and wait.

With around 1/2 an hour to go, and my new demos completely untried, I started getting set up. After getting all fired up and ready to go, I plugged in to the projector system. If you have ever presented at a Microsoft conference, you know that it's not just a VGA cable, it's also that silly USB cable that they insist you have to have, but never have a good explanation of why you can't live without it. Normally, from what I can tell, it doesn't do anything that I would want.

But that morning, it was a special surprise.

Plugging in the USB cable made the keyboard not work correctly. Neither the external keyboard they provided nor the keyboard sitting happily attached to my Tablet PC. I couldn't type any longer.

Now, fortunately I do have a Tablet PC, and the writing functionality *did* still work. I wasn't hosed after all! But I was adding demos on the fly, and I reverted to typing things out of habit on two separate occasions. Oops. So I fixed it, and did a "mouse and ink only" demo on application compatibility. Overall, I think I recovered pretty well, or at least decently.

But it didn't matter - I got slammed. In the reviews:

"Gee a working keyboard can't be that tough to come by."

Apparently it wasn't enough that I had to slog through demos while somebody else's equipment that horked my box, but then I had to get a bad review because of it.

Which brings me to my point:

Your reviews affect the person who is delivering the session only.

I'm fairly certain that nobody else is digging into my session looking for equipment failures (although they probably do aggregate it). I suspect that KVM is still floating around somewhere and will re-emerge somewhere and bite somebody else. Why? Because I don't have any influence over the equipment. I don't run conferences. I just show up and plug in.

The same is true for food. I've had quite a few conference reviews telling me how awful the lunch was. Except ... I don't make lunch at conferences. In fact, if you aren't handed a microwave meal for lunch, it's extremely unlikely that I made your lunch at all - conference or not. Telling me you didn't enjoy the lunch will not get you a better lunch next time.

Giving me a bad score because of bad food, faulty equipment, inadequate snacks, or lack of ice cream doesn't get you those things, but it can keep me away next time. Conference planners like to keep people who get high scores and dump those who don't. Why? Because they want you to be happy and come to the next conference, and that starts with great presenters.

So, low scores are your way to attempt to vote somebody off of the island. If everyone agrees with you, it just might happen. And you should do that - we want you to tell us if we've wasted your time so we stop doing that!

But that brings me to my next point:

People reading evaluations do not reserve the top score for God.

I've done this one myself - but it works a little different in Conference-Land than I would have thought. I would reserve the top score for "absolute perfection", which of course nobody could ever achieve. But, just in case the greatest presenter in the world has the best session of their lives the day I happened to be in the audience, I'd have that score to let them know.

Conference organizers don't think like that. If you have a 5-point Leikert scale, they expect you to average above a 4. If you don't consistently do that, they start thinking of getting you off of the island. They don't view 5 as reserved for God and 4 as the best a mortal could hope for. They view 5 as an excellent session delivered by a mortal. Top box is expected, not something that should be out of reach almost all of the time.

This doesn't mean that you should go handing out top box scores all of the time. People should always earn their scores. But if you are thinking to yourself, "self, that session rocked so hard - I've never seen a better one - I'm giving that presenter the best a mortal can hope for, an amazing 4 out of 5!" then you don't actually communicate that sentiment. Rather, you communicate "that was OK - better than average, at least. Try harder next time."

For, while evals may seem like a place to vent after a tiring week, they're actually more than that. You can try to vote people off of the island if they are just plain awful. You can try to tell people "I love the session and I'd like to come again, but the next time I do, fix this problem because it was really annoying." Just make sure that you are speaking the same language as the people reading it, so the right people interpret it the right way, and what you get next time will be more likely to be what you want (if you didn't get that in the first place).

Oh, and written comments? Always the best feedback. I love them.

I'm looking forward to your feedback from TechEd 2008!

Oh yeah - I’m gunning to participate in the Windows Vista Bloggers’ Panel hosted by Mark Russinovich at TechEd IT Pro week. For some reason they want me to perseverate in reminding you of this. I cannot explain why - seems a bit odd to me. But I hope you'll join in the panel anyway and fling some really tough questions at the panel. It's not to late to register to attend TechEd - head on over to http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2008/itpro/registration/regprocess.mspx.

Please Use Reply to All - I Am Not a Member of This Discussion Group

Chris Jackson — Thu, 15 May 2008 05:26:42 GMT

Every now and then, I see email sent to a discussion list that includes something like the following:

"Please use Reply to All I am not a member of this discussion group."

And sometimes you see something like this instead:

"Please little-R, I am not a member of this discussion group."

I think you can see where I am going with this. If I send a message and you hit Reply, I get the response. If I send a message and you hit Reply to All, I get a response and so does the group. Unless somebody takes the time to manually remove my name from the To line, I get a response. And people are notoriously lazy, so it's extremely unlikely that they would ever do that.

So, the only information that is actually conveyed by this message is that the author doesn't like your little group enough to actually join it, but they sure would like your help right now.

My Worst Travel Day (So Far)

Chris Jackson — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:25:57 GMT

John Robbins asks, "What's your worst travel day?"

Wow, he sure has me beat. I can't top that.

My worst travel day so far was returning home from Taipei last year. We had been watching for days as they were reporting a typhoon might be heading towards Taiwan, and as the day of our departure approached, it looked as if it was pretty likely to come right across Taipei. Sure enough, the day I was supposed to leave, this was on my television:

Yep, it was going to be a fun morning. Of course, there were 3 of us there, and we all kind of wanted to get home. Could we beat the storm?

My friend Rick had left earlier in the day, long before I would ever want to wake up. We hadn't heard from him, so we assumed he must have flown out. So, my friend Mark and I (we were on the same flight) decided we may as well give it a go - the worst that could happen is that we would end up turning around and coming back.

So, we hopped in a cab. The wind was blowing so hard that the prodigious rain was blowing sideways. This did not dissuade our driver from driving beyond quickly. Now, I've been in my share of white knuckle cabs (most recently, I shared one with folks in Barcelona), but there's something objectively different when you're on such a ride during a typhoon. So, we're zipping along, and Mark (who enjoys living) asks the driver to kindly slow down. He nods, and keeps going. A few minutes later, he asks him to slow down again. He acknowledges him again, and keeps going. Mark is occasionally looking at me with a "holy crap" look that's really hard to describe. We watch an SUV spin out of control directly in front of us. Mark offers to pay him money to slow down. This gets the cab slowed for a little while, but then back up to full speed. Finally, Mark decides to name a number, and pull out that much money and show him. "You can have this if you don't go over this speed." This finally works.

We get to the airport whole, and a little surprised to be that way. Here, things are OK. We get our tickets, and head to the lounge. It is then that I realize that I have never emptied my safe at the hotel. So, I have left behind my cell phone, my travel wallet (fortunately no longer containing my passport), and my DVDs (there goes my entertainment for the flight home). There is nothing I need, so I don't have to go back and wait out the storm, but I figure if I am to stand a chance of getting anything back, I ought to call them. Convincing the lounge people to let me use the phone and explain my dilemma is my first challenge, but I eventually succeed. Then, I have to explain to the people at the hotel what I have done, without speaking their language. But they eventually just tell me to email such and such person at this email address to take care of it - they got tired of trying to communicate using the spoken word. So, I try to send the email, and naturally, it bounces. At this point, I've had enough, and I start rationalizing "well, I could use a new cell phone anyhow...."

We eat a few tasty treats while waiting (mmm... dim sum...), and then head to the airplane to board. Once one the plane, Mark and I both agree that this is the worst turbulence we have ever felt while on an airplane. Which was surprising since we were still at the gate and actively boarding - we're both more used to turbulence while actually in the air. So, we had a bit of a white knuckle boarding and taxi, but takeoff was surprisingly smooth. A few bounces on the way up, and finally we could relax.

Oh, and in the end, the hotel in Taipei shipped all of my belonging to me. Grand Hyatt Taipei, I applaud and thank you.

Such was my worst day of travel. I'm glad this is much less rattling than John's!

Looking Back at 2007

Chris Jackson — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 00:57:33 GMT

2007 was really a fun year - I had a blast.

I finally started to get some traction documenting the shims provided in Windows - hopefully you like some of the changes Liz made in ACT 5.0.2 to add good documentation here. I've been talking about it all over the world, and there is still more to come. For internal folks, there are some new sessions I am cooking up for TechReady 6, and for external folks, you'll see the same thing at TechEd IT Forum 2008.

I sure did spend a lot of time on airplanes. I was all over the world, and I managed to reach elite status on 3 different airlines.

I forgot to toss my Marriott and Hilton cards on the pile when I took this picture. I actually ended up spending more nights in a Marriott than I did in any other location, including my house. If they had such a thing as a Double Platinum award, I would have gotten it.

I had a blast speaking at TechEd 2007 and TechEd IT Forum Europe 2007, not to mention two TechReady events. I ended up with some decent reviews, and a lot of constructive feedback on improving my speaking. I also learned that I'm likely to never end up being the top rated speaker at these tip tier events because Mark Russinovich keeps showing up to take that role. Curse you and your personal awesomeness, Mark! :-)

Obviously I'm kidding - I still attend every one of Mark's speeches I can to listen and learn. I sat in on a fantastic class with John Robbins, who promptly asked me what I was doing there, to which my response was that I wanted to learn to be at least as good at teaching people to debug as he is. I clearly still have a ways to go, so I'm still listening to everyone that I can.

I received my first Ship-It Award for ACT 5.0. Folks on product teams are probably saying "whatever, call me when you reach 50" but folks in the field are probably scratching their heads saying, "We can get those? How did you do that?"

I had some great fun collaborating with my friend Aaron, who is definitely not a UI designer, although he writes better code than I do in pretty much every other regard. He's got some really exciting things cooking for 2008, and I am fortunate enough to be able to tag along for a few of them. Speaking of, I really need to get back to work on something...

Here's to a fantastic 2008!

Speaking With Authority on Subjects You Are Not Authoritative About

Chris Jackson — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 09:09:04 GMT

I've been on vacation for a couple of weeks, which has given me some down-time to do some reading and thinking.

Of course, what I have thought about may not always be what the author intended for me to think about, but it tends to be the books with unexpected inspiration that I will remember the longest.

One lesson I really hope I remember: don't use any authority you may or may not have earned on one subject to push assertions on another subject you actually don't know quite enough about.

I picked this little tidbit up from The Math Instinct: Why You're a Mathematical Genius (Along with Lobsters, Birds, Cats, and Dogs). Now, overall, it was an entertaining read, with some good tidbits to think about. The author earned my trust over the course of the book, to the point where I would begin to take for granted some of his assertions.

And then he had to go and make an assertion about something he apparently knows a little bit less about: biology.

Clearly, the author is passionate about his belief in the fact of evolution. But he made the following assertion: "That's far too short a time frame for there to have been any major structural changes in the brain - evolution occurs over hundreds of thousands if not millions of years."

Evolution simply isn't time-bounded. This statement is false. Look at the evolution of the peppered moth. That has happened since the industrial revolution - far fewer than hundreds of thousands of years ago. It is the rapid evolution of bacteria that causes problems with preventing disease. With fewer necessary structures to worry about, higher mutation rates in viruses accelerate this even further.

Major structural changes in the brain are generally prevented because there is extensive error-correction for genes in humans - unbounded mutation would lead to far more ways of creating a human that simply don't work at all, so humans with error correction will be favored over humans without error correction. Furthermore, there are fewer selective pressures on brains - a person with a mutation that causes him or her to have some unique capability may leverage that to, perhaps, make more money, but the person without this advantageous mutation is going to have exactly the same opportunity in most cases to reproduce and pass on his or her genes.

These arguments spun around my head for a bit, and I considered trying to track down the author to vent my frustration for spoiling a perfectly good read with something that was so clearly wrong. But then I realized that, instead, I should find Keith Devlin and thank him instead. This is a blunder that is all too easy to make, and it served as a wake up call to pay attention. I know a little bit about Windows application compatibility, but I could always know more. I know a little bit about Shims, but the folks who write them know more. I respond to a lot of questions, and on more than one occasion I have had to send out a mea culpa owning up to something I was wrong about (which I feel is critical to do, and I hope I haven't forgotten one). And that's with subjects I genuinely am considered somewhat of an expert on. There are plenty of other subjects about which I am genuinely interested and will write about that are more of me thinking aloud than me speaking with authority. I just hope I never use the wrong tone so people quote me as authoritative when I am not. Particularly if I happen to be wrong. Nevertheless, I suspect I probably inadvertently will.

So, thanks, Keith, for giving me a few hours of truly pleasurable reading. And thanks even more for an otherwise innocuous oversimplification that made me realize just how important earning trust and authority is, and how much more important it is not to take that for granted or over-extend it, intentional or not. And for the reader, there is really only one antidote. Just keep reading. Trust but verify. Round out your perspectives. Because you really can't help it - it's a psychological shortcut to take assumptions into account that you are likely not even aware of. Me? I plan to be especially vigilant when discussing topics that may have a blur with subjects about which I actually (mostly) know what I'm talking about. Beyond that, I'm pretty casual, so I'm sure I'll make a few slips.

I'm not sure exactly how to thank Keith, since I don't actually know him, so I figured I'd just link to his books. They are genuinely entertaining and informative. Plus, they'll remind you of just how beautiful mathematics can be. I think we forget that sometimes.

Have a happy new year, and a very compatible 2008!

Marshaling the U.S. Open Golf Tournament

Chris Jackson — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 22:27:02 GMT

I have been somewhat distracted lately, so it has been a while since I posted. I have been knee deep in a number of projects I am working on with one of our customers, and last week, I was volunteering as a Marshal at the U.S. Open Golf Tournament.

Working as a marshal provided me with a whole new perspective on professional golf. Standing directly behind the pros on the tees really gives you a better feel for the decisions that each of them makes. I was specifically working at the 18th hole, which is a particularly challenging dog-leg left. I began to observe how the percentage of pros who were hitting a 3-wood off the tees instead of a driver changed as the winds changed. (And no, I have no idea why Phil hit a driver on 18, especially after he played it safe by hitting a 4-iron on 15.)

Approach to the green at the 9th Hole of Winged Foot's West Course

What really struck me was coming face to face with the fact that this is their job.

And not everybody seemed to be enjoying it.

Now, this may not be exactly fair, given that golf is one of these sports that seems designed to be intentionally frustrating. (It certainly can be for me.) But it was interesting to watch the interactions. One of the caddies who walked past me exhaled deeply, saying "whew, it's almost over." Here is a human being who is tired and ready to get off of work. How often do you normally think of that? A couple of players were joking around with some of the spectators who happened to be calling out to them with particularly heavy New York accents. (References to The Sopranos were thrown around.) They were having a great time, and they were helping the spectators have a great time.

However, some of the pros never cracked a smile. They would take the path between the green of one hole and the tee of the next that minimized the interaction they would have to have with fans. It almost seemed as if this were nothing more than an exercise in rote gross motor control that happened to have a potentially gigantic reward.

As somebody who makes a living exercising creativity, decision making, and fine motor control (well, I do have to tell my fingers what to do on this little keyboard of mine), it really struck me just how sad I would be if I couldn't exercise what talents I happen to have without closing myself off to others, the joy of what I was doing, and sheer, raw exhuberance.

I want to savor every moment of what I am doing.

So, this little experience not only gave me a great view of a golf tournament (inside the rope access does give you a better view, at the cost of not being able to move around freely if what happens to be in front of you is not what you are most interested in), it also gave me a voyeuristic glimpse into another career where technical expertise is what is valued. From this experience, I have renewed my resolve to really savor the experience of working, and not just the rewards of working.

If you have the right job, then it's just too fun not to enjoy it.

By the way, if you were watching the tournament, the 7th hole is where I shot my first birdie ever. (And one of the only ones - let's face it, gross motor control isn't really my forte.)

Random Meetings on the New York City Subway

Chris Jackson — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 00:41:00 GMT

When I first moved to New York City, many of my friends asked me how many famous people I have run into. While I did run in to Larry King at FAO Schwartz once, I am not aware of any other famous people that I have run into in the course of my daily wanderings.

Of course, the key point is that I would have to be aware of them. I am not always the best resource for current pop culture information, and I am particularly not knowledgeable about sports. I was surprised (and later poked fun at by several colleagues) when I saw a guy who lives in my building (a really nice guy who I would bump into in the lobby occasionally and who was always very friendly and outgoing) on television. It turns out that he is a fairly well known pitcher. So much for knowing your neighbors.

NYC Subway Entrance

I was riding home on the subway the other day, and as usual I was sitting reading a book. I happened to be reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. At one of the stops along the way, a man walked in and sat down next to me. He commented that he really liked that book, and I agreed. He then commented that his brother is in the book - he is the doctor in Chicago (Brendan Reilly).

I have no way of verifying the truth of his statement, but he didn't appear to want to use it as an introduction to additional discussions. He just picked up his paper, and began reading as well. Thus, I am inclined to believe his claim. Of all of the brushes with "fame" I have had, this random encounter goes down for me as the most personally relevant.

I guess it just shows that you never know who you are bumping into when you ride the subway. With 124 million riders in a typical month, the person sitting next to you just could have a relevant and interesting story. I'm not sure why I felt the need to bring this up - I just thought it was random in a very interesting way.