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April 2004 - Posts

Units of measurement

Whenever people find out that I work at Microsoft, invariably the next question they ask is “Have you met Bill?” (The next question is: “So what’s with the stock?” – as if I had a magic 8-ball to tell them). I’ve Read More...
Posted Friday, April 30, 2004 2:59 PM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments
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How much is too much?

There was a fascinating discussion on one of our internal mailing lists earlier today, towards the tail end of it, someone asked what the memory management guys would do when machines started coming with 8TB of memory. 5 minutes later came the following Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 29, 2004 5:35 PM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments

Choosing a C runtime library

Yesterday a developer in my group came by asking about a failure he saw when running the application verifier on his component. The app verifier was reporting that he was using a HEAP_NO_SERIALIZE heap from a thread other than the one that created the Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 29, 2004 4:12 PM by LarryOsterman | 22 Comments

What are these "Threading Models" and why do I care?

Somehow it seems like it’s been “ Threading Models ” week, another example of “ Blogger synergy ”. I wrote this up for internal distribution to my group about a year ago, and I’ve been waiting for a good time to post Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 28, 2004 5:09 PM by LarryOsterman | 26 Comments
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Any MVP's out there?

I was just on the first floor of my building and I noticed that they’ve put up laminated posters with the names and pictures of all the multimedia and MCE MVP’s on the wall – pretty cool actually. I don’t have a camera on me; otherwise I’d post a picture Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 27, 2004 10:55 PM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments

What's wrong with this code?

This one comes courtesy of a co-worker who once upon a time was the lead developer for the Manx ( http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~csmweb/decompilation/hist-c-pc.html ) compiler. He ran into the following problem that was reported by the customer. They tried Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 27, 2004 6:40 PM by LarryOsterman | 29 Comments

Viral Schmiral

So Daniel's off on a boat for the next couple of days, and Sharron asked if we could do “Dinner and a Movie”. Our choice for movie last night was “ The Horse in the Grey Flannel Suit ”, a Disney film starring Dean Jones and a horse Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 27, 2004 7:20 AM by LarryOsterman | 1 Comments

What if Microsoft behaved like the Coalition Provisional Authority?

So I’m listening to NPR this morning and I ran into this short article on Morning Edition: The Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq provides information on electricity production and reconstruction projects, but not on security. The coalition Read More...
Posted Monday, April 26, 2004 5:39 PM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

What's Larry doing this weekend?

This weekend, my family and I are participating in Seattle Children’s Theater ’s “Play in a Day” program. Basically we’ll arrive at SCT at 1:00PM, and we’ll start working with director Don Fleming on creating a new Read More...
Posted Friday, April 23, 2004 5:33 PM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments

Things you shouldn't do, part 1 - DllMain is special

A lot of people have written about things not to do in your DllMain. Like here , and here and here . One other thing not to do in your DllMain is to call LoadLibraryEx. As others have written, DllMain’s a really special place to be. If you do anything Read More...
Posted Friday, April 23, 2004 3:36 PM by LarryOsterman | 4 Comments

It's about bloody time...

I recently ran across these two posts (ok, one’s from a month ago). Justice department announces international internet piracy sweep: http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2004/April/04_crm_263.htm Switzerlands's Judical Inquiry Department has taken down Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 22, 2004 9:13 PM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments
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Another Exchange blog posted

KC just posted another of my Exchange blog entries. This one’s on the Exchange 2000 access rights and how Exchange 5.5 access rights were represented in Exchange 2000 . Enjoy! Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 22, 2004 7:20 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments

When global destructors bite

In my work, I use a lot of ATL. And in general, I'm pretty impressed with it. I recently ran into a cool bug that I figured would be worth posting about. First, what's wrong with the following code? main.cpp: #include <stdafx.h> CComPtr<IUnknown> Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 22, 2004 3:03 PM by LarryOsterman | 10 Comments

Spywares

I just noticed that Microsoft Monitor has a blog on this article that Microsoft published last week on Spyware. It's an interesting read with some good suggestions. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 21, 2004 12:55 PM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments

Page 23 Meme

Me to! So the meme works like this: Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 23. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. Ok, here goes: Kirk realized that his M-80 was running low on amunition, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 21, 2004 11:33 AM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments
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Larry's rules of software engineering #2: Measuring testers by test metrics doesn't.

This one’s likely to get a bit controversial J . There is an unfortunate tendency among test leads to measure the performance of their testers by the number of bugs they report. As best as I’ve been able to figure out, the logic works like Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 20, 2004 6:21 PM by LarryOsterman | 27 Comments

It's only temporary

NT has a whole lot of really cool features that aren’t always obvious without REALLY looking closely at the documentation. One of my favorite is what I call “temporary” temporary files. A “temporary” temporary file is one whose storage is never written Read More...
Posted Monday, April 19, 2004 4:43 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

I get all my news on /.

Slashdot has a post on the front page indicating that Microsoft's made the VC 2K3 compiler available for free download here . I gotta say, I'm impressed at the VC team for releasing it, it's pretty amazing IMHO that they'd let this out free of charge Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 18, 2004 7:52 AM by LarryOsterman | 1 Comments

Ok, I lied a bit...

I’m not yet on vacation but I noticed this article about Microsoft starting a new program to enable refurbishing old PCs with new licenses for the Win98 and Win2K pro that was picked up by /. And now I’m wondering what creative reasons the Read More...
Posted Friday, April 09, 2004 9:35 PM by LarryOsterman | 1 Comments
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I've never seen anything that big.

Ok, now put your dirty little minds back in the gutter. Back in the day (1985ish), I was at work and heard a commotion from outside in the hall. I saw one of the Xenix developers holding a box that was about the size of a shoebox. “Look at this! Read More...
Posted Friday, April 09, 2004 4:08 PM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments
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I'm OOF for a week.

Valorie and I are off to Lost Wages for the next week, so it's highly unlikely that I'll be writing anything (we may take the laptops since our hotel is advertising internet access, so you never know, but)... Catch y'all later. Read More...
Posted Friday, April 09, 2004 2:55 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments
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Dave Ross has a weblog!

My favorite talk radio host has a ‘blog! http://www.daveross.com/baghdad/baghdad.htm Now I need to convince him to add an RSS feed. Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 08, 2004 4:06 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments

More Exchange stuff posted

KC just told me that she posted one of my Exchange articles, this one about Bedlam DL3 . Enjoy! Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 08, 2004 3:26 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments

It's on the web, it must be true, right?

This topic shamelessly stolen from my wife J I was listening to NPR the other day and ran into this discussion of Dihydrogen Monoxide . And that reminded me of an experience my wife had in the classroom where she works. Valorie’s a teachers aid Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 07, 2004 3:42 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments
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Larry's rules of software engineering, part 1: Every software engineer should know roughly what assembly language their code generates.

The first in an ongoing series (in other words, as soon as I figure out what more rules are, I’ll write more articles in the series). This post was inspired by a comment in Raymond’s blog where a person asked “You mean you think I’m Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 06, 2004 9:54 PM by LarryOsterman | 20 Comments

Bonzer mailing list of the evening :)

I thought I'd put in a plug for one of the funniest mailing lists I've seen in quite a while: This is true . Randy Cassingham, the moderator collects unusual stories from around the world and posts them weekly, with insiteful taglines attached. Valorie Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 06, 2004 9:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 1 Comments
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Erroneous assumptions

Has anyone noticed that all of the Win32 documentation has something like this for each API: Return Values If the function succeeds, the return value is NO_ERROR. If the function fails, the return value is one of the following error codes. Value Meaning Read More...
Posted Monday, April 05, 2004 11:05 PM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments

One in a million redux

I mentioned my “ one in a million is next Tuesday ” to my wife the other day, and she asked me “So did you include the bit about the PCs clocks?” And it hit me that I hadn’t. Doh! So here it is. It’s kinda fascinating Read More...
Posted Friday, April 02, 2004 6:23 PM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments

You snooze, you lose

Like most companies, Microsoft has an in-house “newspaper”. In our case, it’s called the “MicroNews”. It’s been published weekly every week since I started (I remember one of the articles in the first one I got was Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 01, 2004 6:19 PM by LarryOsterman | 1 Comments
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Just saw this on PRWIRE

Microsoft announces dramatic changes to European business model Company to radically reduce operations REDMOND, Wash. – April 1, 2004 -- Microsoft Corp. today stated that it has determined that it’s best available legal recourse in its ongoing Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 01, 2004 5:18 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments
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