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July 2004 - Posts

The Computer Ate My Vote

I ran into a radio ad for True Majority on my way into work today. True Majority is an online liberal advocacy group founded by Ben Cohen (of Ben&Jerry’s). The ad was for a project of theirs called “ The Computer Ate My Vote ”. Unfortunately, Read More...
Posted Friday, July 30, 2004 4:38 PM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments

Just ran into this on /.: Amit Singh's essay on computer security.

Which can be found here . A truely fascinating read. I just had a quick read-through this morning, but I definitely want to go back later today and read it in more detail. From what I saw earlier, no FUD, just facts. Very nicely done. Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 29, 2004 8:51 AM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments
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How do I open ports in the Windows Firewall, part 3

This is the 3 rd and final article in my discussion of how the WMC product opened holes in the Windows firewall to enable the WMC clients to access the WMC HTTP server. In my last article , I had found an INetConnection object, which had a “guidId” property Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 28, 2004 5:08 PM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

It's Opening Night Tomorrow!

Tomorrow evening, Daniel opens in his first professionally produced show! He’s appearing in SCT’s summer season production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Daniel was one of several thousand kids who auditioned for about a Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 28, 2004 6:53 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments
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Blogging messes up my IE address bar.

When writing my blog, I end up putting a lot of links to stuff on the net. To get the links, I navigate to the page, and select the link in the IE address bar and cut&paste it into Outlook’s compose form (sometimes I need to open in a new window Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 28, 2004 5:54 PM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments
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How do I open ports in the Windows Firewall, part 2

This is the second post in a series of posts that explain how the Windows Media Connect project opened up a particular port through the XP SP2 firewall. In the last post , we had figured out how to actually open the port, but I hadn’t discussed how you Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 27, 2004 8:10 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

How do I open ports in the Windows Firewall?

One of the side-projects I recently was assigned to work on was to switch the Windows Media Connect project from using the home-brewed HTTP server that was originally coded for the product, to using HTTP.SYS, which is included in XP SP2. This was as a Read More...
Posted Monday, July 26, 2004 6:32 PM by LarryOsterman | 22 Comments

The suggestion box is now open!

In my “How am I doing” post , one of the suggestions was that I add a “suggestion box” a la Raymonds. It's a great idea, so I've decided to set one up. It can be found here . Read More...
Posted Friday, July 23, 2004 11:21 AM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments

Larry's Suggestion Box

Someone suggested that I open a Suggestions box similar to Raymonds . It's a good idea, so the suggestion box is now open. Please note that I reserve the right to choose which suggestions I write on, and I'm not likely to write about things I don't know Read More...
Posted Friday, July 23, 2004 11:14 AM by LarryOsterman | 18 Comments

On Campus Interviews with Microsoft

It’s digging back into prehistory time :) WAY back into pre-historical times. Microsoft has always done on-campus interviews, it’s an integral part of the recruiting process. Gretchen and Zoe have written about it a lot here . My on-campus Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 22, 2004 8:23 PM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 4: the answers

As I mentioned yesterday , this is a subtle problem. Apparently it wasn’t subtle enough for the people commenting on the API, without fail, everyone nailed it perfectly. But this IS a problem that I run into at least once a month. Someone comes Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 21, 2004 5:47 PM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments

Every programmer should know assembly language - part two

Jeremy Kelly pointed me to this post that he made about a debugging session that the Exchange escalation guys did that discovered a rootkit running on a customers machine. It is an awesome detective job, and it’s a great example of exactly why (a) Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 21, 2004 4:34 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments
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35 years ago today...

I was seven years old at the time, and I remember getting woken up by my parents and being brought downstairs to where they had a great big party going on (for some reason I thought it was very late in the evening, although I now realize that it was only Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 20, 2004 10:39 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments
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What's wrong wth this code, part 4

Ok, time for another “what’s wrong with this code” problem. This time, I’m writing a DLL. Nothing complicated, just a plain old DLL. As is expected, I publish a header file for my api: // The following ifdef block is the standard Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 20, 2004 5:13 PM by LarryOsterman | 17 Comments

What are Known DLLs anyway?

In my previous post about DLL s and how they work, I commented that winmm.dll was a KnownDLL in Longhorn. It turns out that this is a bug in an existing KnownDLL. But what in the heck ARE Known DLLs in the first place? Well, it turns out that it’s Read More...
Posted Monday, July 19, 2004 6:21 PM by LarryOsterman | 10 Comments
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IE Annoyances..

No, I’m not going to complain about transparent PNG or CSS support. Frankly, since I’m not a webmaster, I don’t care about them (sorry). This one’s pretty specific, and I’m pretty sure that it’s an IE bug. One thing Read More...
Posted Saturday, July 17, 2004 5:09 PM by LarryOsterman | 25 Comments
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Milestones (not Millstones)

In October of 1982 (22 years ago this year!), I met a young woman named Valorie Holden and fell in love with her. She has been my almost constant companion and partner ever since then; we were married in 1987, and now have two wonderful, gifted children. Read More...
Posted Friday, July 16, 2004 8:29 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments
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I, Robot

Michael Gartenberg over at Jupiter Research had a post today about the new movie I, Robot . I’ve seen the trailers for this movie, and I think it may be one of the greatest abominations that Hollywood has ever created. I don’t know WHAT was Read More...
Posted Friday, July 16, 2004 3:48 PM by LarryOsterman | 23 Comments
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Sometime soon, this internet thing is going to be really big, ya know.

But sometimes I wonder if it’s getting TOO big. I don’t normally try to do two rants quick succession, but there was a recent email discussion on an internal mailing list that sparked this rant. There’s a trend I’ve been seeing Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 15, 2004 10:10 PM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments

More on plumbing fixtures...

Found this on snopes.com, my favorite urban legends site. It’s a transparent public toilet installed in a London construction site. Somehow I have potties on the brain today... Edit: Fixed title and images, twice (proxy troubles). Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 14, 2004 9:20 PM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments
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Microsoft and plumbing fixtures.

I was having an email discussion with Ben Slivka the other day, and he asked me what three things were going to make customers enthusiastic about Longhorn. My answer to him was as follows: I'm not sure. My guess would be the changes around the Multimedia Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 14, 2004 4:34 PM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments

New Exchange 'blog post, this one on push notifications

Nico over in Exchange just told me that he posted my article on Exchange’s Push Notification feature, so included by reference :). Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 13, 2004 8:22 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments

Internationalizing Microsoft Products

The Seattle Times has an interesting article today about Microsoft’s efforts to extend beyond the “basic 30-or-so” languages we already support into languages with somewhat smaller market shares (Urdu, Kiswahili, Nepalese etc). It’s Read More...
Posted Monday, July 12, 2004 4:30 PM by LarryOsterman | 23 Comments

Jon Wiswall's started blogging...

I don't normally do “hey, he started blogging” posts, but I just noticed that Jon Wiswall has started a blog . Jon's one of those guys who can be counted on for insightful and intellegent answers during internal discussions, I know that when Read More...
Posted Saturday, July 10, 2004 1:29 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments

So how am I doing?

Well, this is my 100 th post to my weblog, and since its review time at Microsoft, I figured I’d turn the forum over to my readers. I started this weblog 4 months ago after reading Raymond’s ‘blog for several months and marveling at Read More...
Posted Friday, July 09, 2004 7:57 PM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

Microsoft and Art

Sorry about not posting yesterday, I was out with the kids at Seattle Center (Daniel had rehearsals and I was having fun with Sharron), so no time to write up a post (I’m not as well organized as Raymond ). Microsoft’s got a pretty impressive Read More...
Posted Friday, July 09, 2004 5:39 PM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments
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It's the platform, Silly!

I’ve been mulling writing this one for a while, and I ran into the comment below the other day which inspired me to go further, so here goes. Back in May, Jim Gosling was interviewed by Asia Computer Weekly . In the interview, he commented: One Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 07, 2004 7:04 PM by LarryOsterman | 69 Comments

Why should I even bother to use DLL's in my system?

At the end of this blog entry , I mentioned that when I drop a new version of winmm.dll on my machine, I need to reboot it. Cesar Eduardo Barros asked: Why do you have to reboot? Can't you just reopen the application that's using the dll, or restart the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 06, 2004 11:19 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

How to stop politicians from asking you for money

Many years ago, Valorie and I gave money to a gun-control initiative in here in Washington State (a friend and former boss was heavily involved in the campaign). It went down in flames, but not before I got put on the Democratic Party's mailing list as Read More...
Posted Monday, July 05, 2004 4:01 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments
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Impersonation and named pipes.

Someone asked on an internal mailing list why the documentation of security impersonation levels has the following quote: When the named pipe, RPC, or DDE connection is remote, the flags passed to CreateFile to set the impersonation level are ignored. Read More...
Posted Friday, July 02, 2004 7:48 PM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments
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SpaceShipOne pictures

I don’t normally do “me too” posts, but Robert Scoble posted this link to some truly amazing pictures of SpaceShipOne’s first flight and I wanted to share J Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 01, 2004 10:20 PM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments
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What's wrong with this code, Part 3: The answers

In yesterday’s post , there was one huge, glaring issue: It completely ignored internationalization (or i18n in “internet-lingo”). The first problem occurs in the very first line of the routine: if (string1.Length != string2.Length) Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 01, 2004 5:28 PM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments
 
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