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March 2006 - Posts

There are times I'm glad Windows doesn't have a public bug database

From Bruce Schneier's 'blog , I ran into the following Bugzilla bug report . Paraphrased, the bug reports an information disclosure vulnerability in Firefox apparently caused a couple to break up after she discovered a list of web sites he was visiting Read More...
Posted Monday, March 27, 2006 9:22 AM by LarryOsterman | 23 Comments
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Reorgalicious

Brian Valentine may get all his news from the Official Newspaper of the Exchange Windows division (no Brian, I haven't forgotten you abandoned us :)), but I get all my news from Slashdot :) Today, I learned, much to my surprise that I'd been re-orged Read More...
Posted Friday, March 24, 2006 10:48 AM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

Why add a throw() to your methods?

Towards the end of the comments in my last " What's wrong with this code " , hippietim asked why I added a throw() attribute to the destructor of the CCoInitializer. The answer's pretty simple. If you add a throw() attribute around routines that never Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 22, 2006 3:16 PM by LarryOsterman | 17 Comments
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What's wrong with this code - part 18, bonus answer

So the answer to my bonus question was too easy, "hippietim" figured it out in the first comment. The problem is that the loop: for (LONG i = 0 ; i < imageCount ; i += 1) { hr = images->item(CComVariant(), CComVariant(i), &image); if (FAILED(hr)) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 21, 2006 9:19 AM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 18, plus a bonus bad code

So the last " What's wrong with this code " article was dead easy, I knew it was likely that people would find it such. patria found the answer on the 4th comment, and I think that Mike Dimmick put it best: Well, if you're going to use the Resource Acquisition Read More...
Posted Monday, March 20, 2006 11:31 AM by LarryOsterman | 18 Comments

What's wrong with this code, Part 18

This may be the shortest "Bad Code" I've ever done, but it keeps on surprising me how many times I see this problem (people asked me questions about it twice in the past week). // BadCode18.cpp : Defines the entry point for the console application. // Read More...
Posted Friday, March 17, 2006 12:04 PM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

Another year, another post

Well, this year I didn't miss the anniversary of my first blog post . I still can't quite believe it's been two years and over 500 posts (ok, it's only 501, but that's still over 500 :)). My posting rate's dropped as Vista's getting closer to shipping, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 15, 2006 10:20 AM by LarryOsterman | 10 Comments

Fun with names

The other day, someone sent an email to an internal mailing list asking about a "typo" in the eventvwr. It seems they noticed a number of events coming from the "bowser" event source, and they were convinced that it had to be a typo. Well, it's not :) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 14, 2006 11:16 AM by LarryOsterman | 10 Comments

Book Review: Silence on the Wire

In which Larry reviews the book "Silence on the Wire" by Michal Zalewski and finds it interesting but lacking. Read More...
Posted Friday, March 10, 2006 11:10 AM by LarryOsterman | 4 Comments
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More OOBE experiences - D&D Online

Back in January, I wrote about the OOBE of my iRiver H10 player , and I've got another horrid first run story today. Daniel's been pestering us to get DnD Online , and yesterday it arrived. I figured I'd install it for him (to save him the trouble). Man, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 08, 2006 9:54 AM by LarryOsterman | 31 Comments

Audio in Vista, the big picture

So I've talked a bit about some of the details of the Vista audio architecture, but I figure a picture's worth a bunch of text, so here's a simple version of the audio architecture: This picture is for "shared" mode, I'll talk about exclusive mode in Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 07, 2006 10:04 AM by LarryOsterman | 24 Comments
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Hello Mrs. Osterman

Absolutely nothing technical today, just a shout-out to someone I love :). At some point, about 5 or 6 years ago, Valorie decided that it was time for her to go back to school to get her teaching certificate. It turns out that her college courses didn't Read More...
Posted Monday, March 06, 2006 2:45 PM by LarryOsterman | 6 Comments
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Annoying coding tricks

I'm sure I've linked to The Daily WTF , on it Alex Papadimoulis collects egregious programming mistakes and distributes them one per day. This one isn't really that hideous, but I ran into this construct the other day while working on some stuff and it Read More...
Posted Friday, March 03, 2006 11:49 AM by LarryOsterman | 31 Comments

Psychic Perf Analysis, or "RegFlushKey actually DOES flush the registry key"

One of Raymond 's more endearing features is what he calls "Psychic Debugging", it even made his wikipedia entry (wow, he even has a wikipedia entry, complete with picture :)) There's a variant of Psychic Debugging called "Psychic Perf Analysis". It works Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 02, 2006 2:40 PM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

Useful service tricks - Debugging service startup

For the better part of the past 15 years, I've been working on one or another services for the Windows platform (not always services for windows, but always services ON windows). Over that time, I've developed a bag of tricks for working with services, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 01, 2006 10:01 AM by LarryOsterman | 20 Comments
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