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March 2005 - Posts

What is a BUGBUG?

One of the internal software engineering traditions here at Microsoft is the "BUGBUG". Bugbug's are annotations that are added to the source code when the developer writing the code isn't sure if the code they're writing is "correct", or if there's some Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 29, 2005 12:34 PM by LarryOsterman | 27 Comments

Still more misinformation about virtual memory and paging files

The wired network in my building's being unusually flakey so I'm posting this from my laptop, sorry for the brevety.. Slashdot had a front page story today about an article be Adrian Wong posted in his Rojak Pot: " Virtual Memory Optimization Guide ". Read More...
Posted Friday, March 25, 2005 1:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 25 Comments

Open Source and Hot Rods

I was surfing the web the other day and ran into someone linking to this article by Jack Lanier from Edmunds (the automotive newsletter people). The article's entitled "Friends Don't Let Friends Modify Cars". From the article: Today, it's difficult to Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 24, 2005 9:37 AM by LarryOsterman | 61 Comments

Missed Anniversaries

Somehow (and I'm not sure how I managed to do this), I missed the fact that last week was the one year anniversary of this blog! Since I'm usually pretty obsessive about dates, I can't really explain it, but it is. Last year on March 15th, this blog went Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 23, 2005 10:54 AM by LarryOsterman | 17 Comments
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Concurrency, part way too many3: Concurrency and Windows

Work's heading up right now, so this one will be briefer than expected. Windows has its own idea of threading models. In general, each window on the system is owned by a thread, and that thread is responsible for ensuring that the thread is constantly Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 22, 2005 1:28 PM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments
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Concurrency, part way too many2 - Concurrency and the Win32 API set

As I mentioned the other day , I can't quite let go of the concurrency bug, so the 2nd of my 3 add-on posts to the concurrency series. One thing I didn't talk about explicitly in the original concurrency series is the Win32 API set. I implicated the concurrency Read More...
Posted Monday, March 21, 2005 11:06 AM by LarryOsterman | 4 Comments
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Concurrency, part way too many - concurrency and the C runtime library.

For some reason, I can't seem to let this concurrency thing go, I keep on thinking of more and more relevant topics - there are a lot of issues surrounding concurrency. I realized today that my concurrency series didn't talk at all about libraries and Read More...
Posted Friday, March 18, 2005 1:27 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Keeping Kids safe on the internet, revisited.

This is sort-of a follow-up for the article " Keeping kids safe on the internet " that I wrote a while ago. First off, I want to point to the excellent article " What you don't know can hurt kids ". Based on that article, my comments were hopelessly naive. Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 17, 2005 10:16 AM by LarryOsterman | 21 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 10 - the answers

Yesterday's article was a bit of a trick question, but was a real world example. Our group encountered this in some code we were testing last week (in some pre-production code - it was not part of any product). Somewhat surprisingly, it turns out that Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 16, 2005 11:59 AM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

How to destroy the earth

I've seen this twice so far this morning, and it'll get a lot more play RSN, but I'm going to violate my normal "don't repeat a meme" policy because this is just too darned cool... Several places have pointed out this site which gives detailed instructions Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 16, 2005 9:50 AM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments
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What's wrong with this code, part 10

Ok, time for another "what's wrong with this code". This one's trivial from a code standpoint, but it's tricky... // ---------------------------------------------------------------------- // Function: // CThing1::OnSomethingHappening() // // Description: Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 15, 2005 10:32 AM by LarryOsterman | 63 Comments

NPR Has a FASCINATING profile of Donald Knuth this morning...

I'm listening to NPR right now (getting ready for work/school) and I realized they had an article on Knuth. Very cool, and worth listening. And he's just about done with Volume 4! Read More...
Posted Monday, March 14, 2005 6:43 AM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

Microsoft's director of Shared Source is now blogging!

Busy weekend, I'm about to go out-of-town to a seminar with Daniel, and Sharron's got another riding competition (the first one I won't be able to see :(). So a quick note instead of an article I just noticed (via Rick Schaut's blog ) that Jason Matusow Read More...
Posted Friday, March 11, 2005 9:26 AM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments

Concurrency, Part 15 - Wrapping it all up.

Today I want to wrap up my concurrency series (finally). There are some more topics I'll be covering in the future (like the debugging concurrency issues I talked about yesterday :)), but I think I've said a reasonable amount about the issue (and frankly, Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 10, 2005 9:54 AM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments

Concurrency, Part 14 - Odds and Ends

Ok, the light's at the end of the tunnel. I couldn't figure out where to slot this in, so it got stuck at the end... Someone (I'm forgetting who) asked about what happens when someone's producing data to be handed to a pool of threads. The simplest example Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 09, 2005 10:09 AM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments

Concurrency, Part 13 - Concurrency and the CLR

I think I've got two more articles in this series left, I didn't really intend for this to overwhelm my blog for an entire month, but it sort-of got out of hand - I'd originally planned for a total of 6 topics and here I am on the lucky 13th. Anyway, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 08, 2005 10:30 AM by LarryOsterman | 10 Comments

Concurrency, part 12 - Hidden scalability issues, part 2

Last time, I mentioned that even when you get everything right, you can STILL have scalability issues... To explain what's going on, a digression. One of the major features of Exchange 2000 was the ability for the store to access multiple databases (before, Read More...
Posted Monday, March 07, 2005 12:09 PM by LarryOsterman | 24 Comments

Concurrency, part 11 - Hidden scalability issues

So you're writing a server. You've done your research, and you've designed your system to be as scalable as you possibly can. All your linked lists are interlocked lists, you're app uses only one thread per CPU core, you're using fibers to manage your Read More...
Posted Friday, March 04, 2005 9:48 AM by LarryOsterman | 21 Comments

Concurrency, Part 10 - How do you know if you've got a scalability issue?

Well, the concurrency series is finally running down (phew, it's a lot longer than I expected it to be)... Today's article is about determining how you know if you've got a scalability problem. First, a general principle: All non trivial, long lived applications Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 03, 2005 11:02 AM by LarryOsterman | 21 Comments

Concurrency, Part 9 - APIs that enable scalable programming

Sorry, I just noticed that this didn't get posted yesterday - I don't know what happened, but... As I mentioned the other day , Win32 provides a number of tools for writing scalable applications. Today I want to catalog some of them. Remember, that the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 02, 2005 9:37 AM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments
 
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