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August 2004 - Posts

Surveillance at a local Shell station

Valorie was out getting gas the other day and she noticed that the attendant at the local Shell station was collecting license plate #s, descriptions of vehicles and a description of the driver for all the vehicles filling up at the pump. The station Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 31, 2004 7:26 PM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments
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A Parable

Valorie’s first day back at work was yesterday, and the principal at her school led a discussion about the following parable: Once upon a time there was a town that was built just beyond the bend of a large river. One day some of the children from Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 31, 2004 3:26 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

LarryO's Suggestion box

LarryO's comment policy Read More...
Posted Monday, August 30, 2004 9:45 AM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments

The suggestion box is now back open

The old suggestion box had its comment period expire, so I've recreated it. Feel free to add to it at will. Read More...
Posted Monday, August 30, 2004 9:48 AM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments

So what'd I do on Friday?

Well, the day was pretty much a wash, work-wise. I spent most of the day swapping war stories with co-workers. On the other hand, the 20 dozen bouncy balls I brought into work were a huge hit. Bouncy balls have long participated in Microsoft events, Hans Read More...
Posted Monday, August 30, 2004 9:41 AM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments
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It was 20 years ago today...

Nope, Sgt Pepper didn’t teach the band to play. 20 years ago today, a kid fresh out of Carnegie-Mellon University showed up at the door of the 10700 Northup Way, ready to start his first day at a real job. What a long strange trip it’s been. Over the Read More...
Posted Friday, August 27, 2004 4:04 PM by LarryOsterman | 74 Comments

XP SP2 Craters

So the newswires and forums are buzzing about this reported security flaw in XP SP2. Essentially they are complaining that the security center in SP2 uses WMI to store its metadata and an administrator can modify the metadata to convince the user that Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 26, 2004 4:53 PM by LarryOsterman | 32 Comments
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Nineteen years ago today (ok, by now, everyone sees where this one's going :))

Back in 1995, I was working over in the Northup building. Valorie had joined me from school, and was working as a tester on Microsoft Word (she tested the Apricot version of Word and the AT&T 3b5 port, and the IBM OfficeWriter converter) and Microsoft Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 26, 2004 10:20 AM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments
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Eighteen years ago...

It was 1986. I was working for Eric Evans at the time, working with Alan Whitney on finishing up MS-DOS 4.0 (for Goupil) and starting to get ramped up on MS-DOS 4.1. I was also getting settled into my new office in building 2 in the new campus. The move Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 25, 2004 10:25 AM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments
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Seventeen years ago today

I was finishing up on the MS-DOS 4.1 project and started working in the networking group, working on MS-NET 1.10, which was a precursor to the first Lan Manager product. I was working for Barry Shaw, with two other developers, who were working as vendors Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 24, 2004 3:26 PM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments
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Things to do with your son over a long wet weekend...

This weekend, Daniel and I went to Dash Point State Park for a lovely two days of working out in the rain with a dozen other members of our dojo (karate school). We arrived on Saturday morning at 8:30AM and left at 5:00 on Sunday, and we worked out a Read More...
Posted Monday, August 23, 2004 1:42 PM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments
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Silly historical notes

One of the comments in my “interviews” post reminded me about something that happened when I was interviewing. The interview process at Microsoft has the interviewee being shepherded from one office to the next, and the interviewee gets asked questions Read More...
Posted Friday, August 20, 2004 7:14 PM by LarryOsterman | 4 Comments
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Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your stackframe grow?

So there was a discussion on an internal mailing list yesterday, and Raymond popped in with the following quote: The problem is that some people draw stacks growing downward (so "top of stack" is lowest) and others growing upward (so "top of stack" is Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 19, 2004 6:34 PM by LarryOsterman | 19 Comments

Ok, what the heck IS the windows audio service (audiosrv) anyway?

This morning, Dmitry asked what the heck was the audio service for anyway. That's actually a really good question. For Windows XP, the most common use for the audiosrv service is that if the audiosrv service didn't exist, applications that linked with Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 18, 2004 10:20 AM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments
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Why didn't XP SP2 install copy the right SP2 DLL when there was a DLL with a higher version number on the machine?

In yesterday’s post , I mentioned that SP2’s installation didn’t update a Longhorn version of the Windows Audio service, and that caused customer difficulties. I left unanswered the basic question: Why on earth didn’t the SP2 upgrade Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 17, 2004 4:39 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments
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Debugging a problem: Audio stops working after an XP SP2 install

A number of people have asked for me to write up my experiences debugging a problem. The thing is that it’s hard to do that explicitly without disclosing internals of functions that probably shouldn’t be disclosed (because they relate to features that Read More...
Posted Monday, August 16, 2004 7:45 PM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

So why didn't the Windows guys just remove the AARD code from the system?

In yesterday’s post I talked about the AARD code. One of the questions that perennially comes up is “Why on earth didn’t the Windows guys just remove that code”? Well, the answer is that it would have likely broken far more code Read More...
Posted Friday, August 13, 2004 6:49 PM by LarryOsterman | 1 Comments

I can't let this one pass by...

I just discovered this web page (via /.). The wizards at Microsoft research have figured out how to turn real life movies into animated movies. It takes tweaking to make it work, but... Check out the WMV file too. Wow. Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 12, 2004 10:10 PM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments

Sometimes you've just got to wonder.

I just ran into this on Microsoft's " What to Know Before You Download and Install Windows XP Service Pack 2 " site: • Memory: You need at least 2 gigabytes (GB) of free memory space on your hard disk. To check your free memory space, click Start , click Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 12, 2004 9:55 PM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments
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AARDvarks in your code.

If there was ever a question that I’m a glutton for punishment, this post should prove it. We were having an email discussion the other day, and someone asked: Isn't there a similar story about how DOS would crash when used with [some non-MS thing] and Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 12, 2004 6:33 PM by LarryOsterman | 29 Comments
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Where do I get netfw.h?

Bruce Wells asked (in the comments of my “ opening firewalls ” ‘post) where you should go to get netfw.h. Well, after a bit of searching, I found it, it was surprisingly difficult (don’t ask). It turns out that netfw.h isn’t Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 11, 2004 7:42 PM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments
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My dinner with Bill

Funny coincidences. I was thinking about writing up my experiences at the one time I was invited to Bill’s house (about 5 years ago, it was a party for 15+ year veterans), and I ran into this post from Jeff Maurone. Jeff’s experiences pretty Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:22 PM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments

Three years ago today

I was cleaning up the remaining bits in the Simple Control Protocol , and wondering what I'd be doing next. SCP was a cool project to work on - it was a low bandwidth networking technology intended for home automation. On the project, I was responsible Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 10, 2004 1:11 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments

Insecurity in our daily lives

Last week (or so), Joe Wilcox of MicrosoftMonitor posted this article describing the Joe’s experiences in a hotel. He is SO on. A couple of weeks ago, I spent the afternoon at an espresso stand on Queen Anne Hill which advertised free WIFI access Read More...
Posted Monday, August 09, 2004 10:11 PM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments
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Not in my backyard, you don't!

A bit of context for those of you who aren’t in the Seattle area. Recently, a local church in Bothell decided to host a homeless shelter known as “Tent City 4 ”. This decision caused a great deal of consternation on the part of the people living around Read More...
Posted Friday, August 06, 2004 7:11 PM by LarryOsterman | 39 Comments
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The consequences of ignoring nagling and delayed acks

Over most of this week, I’ve discussed how ignoring the underlying network architecture can radically hurt an application . Now it’s time for a war story about how things can go awry if you don’t notice these things. One of the basic Read More...
Posted Friday, August 06, 2004 5:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 5: The answers

Yesterday’s post was a simple implementation of TransmitFile. First things first: I need to apologize. I was being a bit sneaky in this case. The code in the example was written to function correctly, and that mislead a lot of people who were trying Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 05, 2004 5:48 PM by LarryOsterman | 19 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 5

So there was a reason behind yesterday’s post about TransmitFile , it was a lead-in for “What’s wrong with this code, part 5”. Consider the following rather naïve implementation of TransmitFile (clearly this isn’t the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 04, 2004 9:06 PM by LarryOsterman | 53 Comments

My favorite APIs: TransmitFile

Back in NT 3.5ish, Microsoft first deployed IIS, our web server. The people working on it very quickly realized that the server wasn’t up to snuff performance-wise. A bit of profiling and they realized the problem – the application was doing: Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 03, 2004 9:37 PM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments
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Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

Thanks For Letting Us Know Vernon Blake, an engineer at the Alabama Department of Transportation, was upset that it was an office joke that his boss spent most of his workday playing computer games. Since he was the department's network administrator, Read More...
Posted Monday, August 02, 2004 5:12 PM by LarryOsterman | 17 Comments

Comment Policy is now up.

I got nailed by a new blog-spammer yesterday, so it's my turn to follow KC and Raymond and post a comment policy. My new comment policy can be found here . It's unlikely to change anything, except for the blog-spam, I've never had any issues with anyone Read More...
Posted Monday, August 02, 2004 11:01 AM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments

Larry's Comment Policy

I reserve the right to edit, remove, or ignore any comment I choose. I try to be responsive, but if you ask a question, don't expect that it obligates me to respond. I reserve the right to ignore and/or remove comments on blog posts older than two weeks. Read More...
Posted Monday, August 02, 2004 10:57 AM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments
 
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