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More fun with Amazon reviews.

A co-worker sent this around and I just HAD to share it…   It’s not nearly as geeky as “The Story of Ping”.   For those that don’t want to follow the link, these are some of reviews for this:   “I bought this review based on all of Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 04, 2009 2:35 PM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments
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Why are they called “giblets” anyway?

Five years ago, I attended one of the initial security training courses as a part of the XP SP2 effort.  I wrote this up in one of my very first posts entitled “ Remember the giblets ” and followed it up last year with “ The Trouble with Giblets Read More...
Posted Monday, October 26, 2009 9:05 AM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments
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Windows 7 Reflections…

Today[1] Microsoft formally launched Windows 7.  I can’t say how proud I am of the work we did in Windows 7 – it’s been an amazing journey.  This is the 4th version of Windows I’ve worked on and I have never felt this way about a release of Read More...
Posted Friday, October 23, 2009 10:53 AM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments
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Win7 Whoppers

Wow, one of my co-workers just sent this image out. It’s totally awesome (IMHO)… http://twitpic.com/mehp6/full Edit: The image tag didn't work for some reason so I removed it and just left the link... Bonus: The first Win7 ad: http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/10/21/multimedia/1247465293593/an-ad-for-windows-7-from-microsoft.html Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 21, 2009 6:39 PM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments
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Looking for new skillz (turning the blog around)…

Just for giggles, I went looking at the various job listings within Microsoft and outside Microsoft (no, I’m not going anywhere, I was just curious).  While looking, I realized that I had absolutely no marketable skills :).  Nobody seems to Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 20, 2009 5:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 40 Comments

I can make it arbitrarily fast if I don’t actually have to make it work.

Digging way back into my pre-Microsoft days, I was recently reminded of a story that I believe was told to me by Mary Shaw back when I took her Computer Optimization class at Carnegie-Mellon… During the class, Mary told an anecdote about a developer “Sue” Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 29, 2009 2:49 PM by LarryOsterman | 26 Comments

Building a flicker free volume control

When we shipped Windows Vista, one of the really annoying UI annoyances with the volume control was that whenever you resized it, it would flicker.  To be more specific, the right side of the control would flicker – the rest didn’t flicker (which Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 16, 2009 2:50 PM by LarryOsterman | 30 Comments

The story behind the mysterious “Ding” in Windows Vista.

I just ran into this fairly old post on Channel 9.  mstefan reported that his applications played a “Ding” noise when selecting an item in a listview (or tree) control.   It turns out that I’d had the problem independently reported to me by Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 03, 2009 5:29 PM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments

What’s the difference between GetTickCount and timeGetTime?

I’ve always believed that the most frequently used multimedia API in winmm.dll was the PlaySound API.  However I recently was working with the results of some static analysis tools that were run on the Windows 7 codebase and I realized that in fact Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 02, 2009 2:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 26 Comments
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Digging into the history bin (AKA: Microsoft Developer says that Windows is useless)

As I was writing my “25 years of Larry’s history at Microsoft in 1 year chunks” blog posts, I spent a fair amount of time digging through my email archives (trying to figure out exactly what happened at what time).  During this, I ran into a link Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 01, 2009 11:49 AM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

25 Years Ago Today (August 27th, 1984)

I got up in the morning from temporary housing and put on my 3 piece business suit to start my first day of work at a relatively small computer company near Seattle called “Micro-Soft” or something like that. Within a day I’d been ridiculed for my choice Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 27, 2009 2:55 PM by LarryOsterman | 19 Comments

24 years ago today (1985)

Way back in 1985 I was busy working on MS-DOS 4.0. MS-DOS 4.0 was a multitasking derivative of MS-DOS 2.0 (during 1985 we integrated the changes for MS-DOS 3.1 to MS-DOS 4.1). It’s important to remember the difference between MS-DOS and PC-DOS. PC-DOS Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 26, 2009 10:50 AM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments

23 years ago today (1986)

23 years ago, I was working on finishing MS-DOS 4.0 and transitioning to work on MS-DOS 4.1.  We also moved from the original Northup campus to the brand new 4 building campus herein Redmond.  At the time the company mandated that we give up Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 25, 2009 12:56 PM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments

20, 21 and 22 years ago (1987-1989)

Ok, at this point it should be blindingly obvious where this series is going :). In early 1987 I was still working on MS-DOS 4.1, a custom version of DOS for ICL in the UK. I also got married to my wonderful wife Valorie in January. We returned from our Read More...
Posted Monday, August 24, 2009 12:24 PM by LarryOsterman | 6 Comments

Nineteen years ago today (1990)

In 1990 I joined the WIndows NT OS/2 team after working on Lan Manager for several years.  I was one of about 4-5 developers who moved from the Lan Manager team to join the much storied NT OS/2 developers.  I still have my copy of the NT OS/2 Read More...
Posted Friday, August 21, 2009 2:58 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments
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