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March 2004 - Posts

One in a million is next Tuesday

Back when I was a wee young lad, fresh from college, I thought I knew everything there was to know. I’ve since been disabused of that notion, rather painfully. One of the best happened very early on, back when I was working on DOS 4. We ran into Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 30, 2004 8:07 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

So you need a worker thread pool...

And, for whatever reason, the NT’s built-in thread pool API doesn’t work for you. Most people would write something like the following (error checking removed to reduce typing (and increase clarity)): class WorkItem { LIST_ENTRY m_listEntry; Read More...
Posted Monday, March 29, 2004 6:08 PM by LarryOsterman | 17 Comments

Problems...

Donald Rumsfeld made the concept of “unknown unknowns” popular recently , but I actually first heard the comment back in 1985ish. One of the Microsoft program managers I worked with was discussing his idea of a concept of “hierarchy Read More...
Posted Friday, March 26, 2004 5:00 PM by LarryOsterman | 4 Comments

What's the difference between MS-DOS and PC-DOS?

In the following comment Louis Parks asked about MS-DOS/PC-DOS being a joint deal with IBM. Actually the answer’s a bit more complicated and has to do with the way the PC market worked back in the 1980s. People these days don’t remember what Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 25, 2004 9:43 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

Exchange 5.5's access check logic

I just noticed that KC posted the first of the blog entries I wrote for the Exchange team last week, check it out! http://blogs.msdn.com/exchange/archive/2004/03/17/91454.aspx Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 23, 2004 5:59 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments

Did you know that OS/2 wasn't Microsoft's first non Unix multi-tasking operating system?

Most people know about Microsoft’s official timeline for its operating-system like products 1. Xenix - Microsoft’s first operating system, which was a version of UNIX that we did for microprocessors. 2. MS-DOS/PC-DOS, a 16 bit operating system Read More...
Posted Monday, March 22, 2004 11:27 PM by LarryOsterman | 42 Comments

Non Technical: She came, She saw, She kicked hiney!

So Sharron competed in her first dressage competition over the weekend. And she utterly and absolutely rocked! Sharron competed in two tests, the intro level A and B tests, she got 2 nd place in the level A test, and 1 st place in the level B test (a Read More...
Posted Monday, March 22, 2004 3:53 PM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments

Non Technical: So What's Larry going to be doing this weekend?

For the past two years, my daughter Sharron’s been taking dressage lesson’s at a local dressage training facility, and she’s gotten pretty darned good at it. Back in October, Sharron really wanted to start competing in dressage, and Read More...
Posted Friday, March 19, 2004 8:50 PM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments

Why doesn't CTRL-C stop NET USE?

John Vert’s been griping about this issue to me for literally 14 years now. I do a NET USE * \\MYSERVER\SERVERSSHARE from the CMD.EXE prompt and the console hangs. No amount of hitting CTRL-C will get it back until that silly application decides Read More...
Posted Friday, March 19, 2004 6:03 PM by LarryOsterman | 6 Comments

So why does NT require such a wonking great big paging file on my machine?

UPDATE 5/5/2004: I posted a correction to this post here . Sorry if there was any inconvenience. Raymond Chen posted a fascinating comment on the dangers that paging causes server applications the other day. One of the people commenting asked one of the Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 18, 2004 3:19 PM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

When security firms offer bad advice.

So I’m reading /. and I ran into the following article: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/17/1942232&mode=nested&tid=126&tid=128&tid=172&tid=185&tid=190&tid=201 In the article is a link to someone known as the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 17, 2004 7:59 PM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments

Things not to do when writing software

I figured I’d start off with an old war story. A REALLY old story. From back in the Windows 1.0 days. Once that could never ever happen these days. It’s about 2 months before Windows 1.0 is about to ship (so it’s sometime around August/September Read More...
Posted Monday, March 15, 2004 10:12 PM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments

Howdy!

Ok, so they've finally convinced me to go live with something that resembles my own thoughts (instead of just making snippy comments about other peoples’ posts :))... So who am I and why do I think that anyone in their right mind would care about Read More...
Posted Monday, March 15, 2004 2:54 PM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments
 
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