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January 2009 - Posts

Friday, January 30, 2009 7:00 AM

The problem with The Month Where Everyone Focuses on Improving Documentation is that most people are terrible technical writers

Technical writing is a special skill.
Posted by oldnewthing | 38 Comments
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Thursday, January 29, 2009 7:00 AM

Games to play at your Battlestar Galactica watching party

Some things to do.
Posted by oldnewthing | 11 Comments
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Thursday, January 29, 2009 7:00 AM

A process shutdown puzzle

Why do we deadlock?
Posted by oldnewthing | 29 Comments
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Wednesday, January 28, 2009 7:00 AM

The great thing about being popular is that everybody wants to see you go down

Spam attacks, denial of service, all that jazz.
Posted by oldnewthing | 20 Comments
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Wednesday, January 28, 2009 7:00 AM

When you have only 16KB of memory, you can't afford to waste any of it on fluffy stuff

Every byte counts.
Posted by oldnewthing | 16 Comments
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Tuesday, January 27, 2009 7:00 AM

There's camping, and then there's luxury camping, and then there's ridiculous luxury camping

To the point where it isn't even camping any more.
Posted by oldnewthing | 6 Comments
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Tuesday, January 27, 2009 7:00 AM

Why can't I see all of the 4GB of RAM in my machine?, redux

More tips from Phil Taylor.
Posted by oldnewthing | 15 Comments
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Monday, January 26, 2009 7:00 AM

I think I can read the bassoonist's music from here

Not quite but almost.
Posted by oldnewthing | 8 Comments
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Monday, January 26, 2009 7:00 AM

But then we ran into problems when we started posting 10,000 messages per second

The message queue is not a general purpose high-performance IPC mechanism.
Posted by oldnewthing | 4 Comments
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Friday, January 23, 2009 7:00 AM

Why can't you apply ACLs to registry values?

Because it would just bring you full circle.
Posted by oldnewthing | 22 Comments
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Thursday, January 22, 2009 7:00 AM

Why do I get the error REGDB_E_IIDNOTREG when I call a method that returns an interface?

Because there is no marshaller.
Posted by oldnewthing | 5 Comments
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Wednesday, January 21, 2009 7:00 AM

If you have full trust, then you can do anything, so don't be surprised that you can do bad things, too

Oh dear, I corrupted the stack.
Posted by oldnewthing | 30 Comments
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Tuesday, January 20, 2009 7:00 AM

If you didn't like the answer, asking the same question again is unlikely to help

Can I have a pony?
Posted by oldnewthing | 33 Comments
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Monday, January 19, 2009 7:00 AM

May the Horse Be With You: Stories from the racetrack

Harvey Pack and horse racing.
Posted by oldnewthing | 0 Comments
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Monday, January 19, 2009 7:00 AM

Why isn't the screen resolution a per-user setting?

A few reasons, some lazier than others.
Posted by oldnewthing | 50 Comments
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Friday, January 16, 2009 7:00 AM

You cannot pre-emptively reserve a file extension

File extensions are meant to be shared.
Posted by oldnewthing | 52 Comments
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Thursday, January 15, 2009 7:00 AM

If you're at a Thai restaurant with a Thai person who's ordering food in Thai, and she asks you if you like your food spicy, think twice before answering

You have to consider the scale.
Posted by oldnewthing | 46 Comments
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Thursday, January 15, 2009 7:00 AM

What is this magic setting that synthesizes Unicode from non-Unicode?

It chooses your default code page.
Posted by oldnewthing | 15 Comments
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Wednesday, January 14, 2009 7:00 AM

The day shell.windows.com went down

Could you plug it back in?
Posted by oldnewthing | 41 Comments
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Tuesday, January 13, 2009 7:00 AM

Excessive speed appeared to be a factor in the crash

Also, the driver was twelve years old.
Posted by oldnewthing | 21 Comments
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Tuesday, January 13, 2009 7:00 AM

Where does shell.windows.com get information about file extensions, and how do I get in on that action?

KB article 929149 tells all.
Posted by oldnewthing | 46 Comments
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Monday, January 12, 2009 7:00 AM

xkcd breaks the news on the new Windows 7 user interface

More or less Hitler-y.
Posted by oldnewthing | 9 Comments
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Monday, January 12, 2009 7:00 AM

How does PostQuitMessage know which thread to post the quit message to?

It posts to the current thread.
Posted by oldnewthing | 8 Comments
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Friday, January 09, 2009 7:00 AM

It's surprising how suddenly those new skins started pouring in

Kick-starting the process.
Posted by oldnewthing | 37 Comments
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Thursday, January 08, 2009 7:00 AM

The programmers don't design skins; they just make skins possible

Division of labor.
Posted by oldnewthing | 37 Comments
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Wednesday, January 07, 2009 7:00 AM

Raymond misreads flyers: A Taste of WWL

Mmmmm... mustard gas...
Posted by oldnewthing | 14 Comments
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Wednesday, January 07, 2009 7:00 AM

When debugging a stack overflow, you want to focus on the repeating recursive part

Because that's where the problem is.
Posted by oldnewthing | 10 Comments
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Tuesday, January 06, 2009 7:00 AM

Microspeak: Learnings

As opposed to teachings.
Posted by oldnewthing | 22 Comments
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Monday, January 05, 2009 7:00 AM

Not my finest hour: Misreading a product label

07734.
Posted by oldnewthing | 26 Comments
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Monday, January 05, 2009 7:00 AM

Even if you have code to handle a message, you're allowed to call DefWindowProc, because you were doing that anyway after all

Just because you have a case statement for it doesn't mean you're entirely on your own.
Posted by oldnewthing | 16 Comments
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Friday, January 02, 2009 7:00 AM

Kids love cake, but that doesn't make them good judges of cake

At the wedding show.
Posted by oldnewthing | 19 Comments
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Friday, January 02, 2009 7:00 AM

Why doesn't Windows 95 format floppy disks smoothly?

That pesky compatibility again.
Posted by oldnewthing | 49 Comments
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Thursday, January 01, 2009 7:00 AM

Follow-up: A new DUI record set in the state of Washington

One year.
Posted by oldnewthing | 9 Comments
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Thursday, January 01, 2009 7:00 AM

How do I write a program that can be run either as a console or a GUI application?

You can't, but you can try to fake it.
Posted by oldnewthing | 29 Comments
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