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May 2005 - Posts

Exceptions as repackaged error codes

One of the comments on my philosopy of error codes post from last week indicated that all the problems I listed with error codes were solved by exceptions. The thing that I think the writer missed is that CLR (and Java) exceptions serve two totally different Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 31, 2005 1:01 PM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments

No post today, prepping for my presentation :( <EOM>

And community server seems to believe that I need to provide content. So, to make it happy, I'll provide content. It won't be interesting content, but it WILL be content. Sorry about that :) Read More...
Posted Friday, May 27, 2005 10:36 AM by LarryOsterman | 4 Comments

Why does Windows share the root of your drive?

Out-of-the box, a Windows system automatically shares the root of every hard drive on the machine as <drive>$ (so you get C$, D$, A$, etc). The shares are ACL'ed so that only members of the local administrative group can access them, and they're Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 26, 2005 12:45 PM by LarryOsterman | 25 Comments

How do you know what a particular error code means?

So you're debugging your program, and all of a sudden you get this wierd error code - say error 0x00000011. How do you know what that message means? Well, one way is to memorize the entire Win32 error return code set, but that's got some issues. Another Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 25, 2005 11:38 AM by LarryOsterman | 17 Comments
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How do you know what a particular error code means?

So you're debugging your program, and all of a sudden you get this wierd error code - say error 0x00000011. How do you know what that message means? Well, one way is to memorize the entire Win32 error return code set, but that's got some issues. Another Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 25, 2005 1:38 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments

Error Codes, again...

One of the tech writers in my group just asked a question about documenting error codes. I've written about my feelings regarding documenting error codes in the past, but I've never actually written about what it means to define error codes for your component. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 24, 2005 4:34 PM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments

Larry's Rules of software engineering, Part 4 - Writing servers is easy, writing clients is HARD.

Over the past 20 years or so, I've written both (I wrote the first NT networking client and I wrote the IMAP and POP3 servers for Microsoft Exchange), so I think I can state this with some authority. I want to be clear - it's NOT easy to write a server Read More...
Posted Monday, May 23, 2005 1:33 PM by LarryOsterman | 24 Comments

Too busy to write something interesting today

I'm busy preparing for a techtalk on our new Longhorn feature to be given in my building at 1PM in the conference room on the Okanogon room. Any MS people who see this should feel free to attend. This is a warmup for my Friday DevTalk at the Olympic Room Read More...
Posted Friday, May 20, 2005 1:24 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments
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My New Monitor's Here! My New Monitor's Here!

With apologies to Steve Martin . I just got my new monitor (after the whole Office Move thingy I decided I didn't want to move the big monitors again). It's a Del 2001FP which does 1600x1200 natively. Oh man, I don't know WHAT I was thinking of in waiting Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 19, 2005 5:40 PM by LarryOsterman | 34 Comments

More CD Audio Trivia

A Co-worker pointed this out to me: http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq02.html#S2-29 : The general belief is that it was chosen because the CD designers wanted to have a format that could hold Beethoven's ninth symphony. They were trying to figure out what dimensions Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 18, 2005 1:16 PM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments

Grocery Wars

While we were going to the lecture on Monday, Todd Bowra mentioned a Star Wars parody called (Grocery) Store Wars. Coincidentally, someone sent Valorie a link to it yesterday (go figure that). So, in honor of tomorrows debut, I present... Store Wars Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 18, 2005 11:42 AM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments
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Tracing the Journey of Man

Nothing technical today, sorry :( Went to a fascinating lecture last night with friends of the family (the Bowras). It was a part of National Geographic's " National Geographic Live! " series. The NG Live series is a series of three or four Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 17, 2005 1:32 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Why I removed the MSN desktop search bar from IE

I was really quite excited to see that the MSN Desktop Search Team had finally released the final version of their MSN Desktop Search toolbar . I've been using it for quite a while, and I've been really happy with it (except for the minor issue that the Read More...
Posted Monday, May 16, 2005 1:18 PM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 12 - Retro Bad Code Answers

In the last article , I looked at a prototype code snippet to enter a system call. But the code had a bug in it (no, really? Why would I be asking what was wrong with it otherwise)? Not surprisingly, it wasn't that hard to find, Peter Ibbotson found it Read More...
Posted Monday, May 16, 2005 12:11 PM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 12 - Retro Bad Code

I was at a security tech talk last week discussing some fascinating stuff, and it reminded me of an interview question that my manager used to give to people who said that they understood x86 Assembly language. I realized that it would make an interesting Read More...
Posted Friday, May 13, 2005 12:00 PM by LarryOsterman | 23 Comments

End of Life Issues

Wow. Yesterday I asked y'all when it was ok to end-of-life an API . I'm astonished at the quality of the responses. For real. Almost everyone had great ideas about it - some were more practical than others but everyone had great ideas. Several people Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 12, 2005 5:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 22 Comments

Turning the blog around - End of Life issues.

I'd like to turn the blog around again and ask you all a question about end-of-life issues. And no, it's got nothing to do with Terry Schaivo. Huge amounts of text have been written about Microsoft's commitment to platform stability. But platform stability Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 11, 2005 11:49 AM by LarryOsterman | 43 Comments

SPOILER WARNING ABOUT THE AMAZING RACE - Yes, there is justice in the world...

Massive Edit: Spoiler Warning (Sorry about that - I figured front page on MSNBC.COM was enough :() Uchenna and Joyce won. And they did it with style - even though they were at the finish line, they STILL waited to scrounge enough money to pay their cabbie. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 11, 2005 1:07 AM by LarryOsterman | 17 Comments
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Threat Modeling, Part 3 - Process

Continuing the discussion on threat modeling that I started in this post (and continued in this one)... There's a critical third part of threat modeling, and that's the process of threat modeling. Threat modeling is a discipline - you need to start the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 10, 2005 3:38 PM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments
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Moving offices - again

Editors Note: This was posted last Thursday evening, and was promptly lost in a blog rollback. Apologies to those who have already read it. I moved my office today. I hate office moves. I don't know how many times I've done it (it's been well over a dozen, Read More...
Posted Monday, May 09, 2005 1:18 PM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments

Playing audio CDs, part 11 - Why isn't my sample ready for prime time?

As I mentioned in my previous post , the code I've provided will play back audio CDs. But it's not ready for prime time yet. There are four major problems with the code. First off, the error handling isn't 100% up-to-snuff. In particular, there are several Read More...
Posted Friday, May 06, 2005 2:34 PM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments

Playing Audio CDs, part 10 - Glitch Free, Low Memory

So yesterday I wrote an example that removed the glitching from my DAE CD playback example. But it had some major drawbacks - for example, it consumed huge amounts of system memory, and had absolutely horrendous latency problems - if you wanted to pause Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 05, 2005 12:19 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Playing Audio CDs, part 9 - Fixing Glitches

When we last left playing back audio, we had playback working, but it was glitching like CRAZY - literally every packet read had a glitch during playback. So lets see if we can fix the glitching problem. As I mentioned yesterday, the root cause of the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 04, 2005 12:50 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Daniel got the part!

Somehow I forgot to mention that we just got notice that Daniel was cast in the Seattle Children's Theater summer season production of the musical " Honk! ". They'll be doing 5 weeks of rehearsals and then 4 days of production afterwards. Daniel was in Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 03, 2005 5:43 PM by LarryOsterman | 6 Comments
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Playing Audio CDs, part 8 - Simple DAE Playback

Ok, time to get down and dirty in the "CD Playback" series. Up until now, we've just been reading metadata from the CD. Now it's time to read the actual audio data and play it back. First, a bit about playback. To do the playback, we'll be using the waveOutXxx Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 03, 2005 1:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

Microsoft Careers - Meet Our People: Larry

Dare and KC have already mentioned this, but... They've just updated the Microsoft Careers " Meet our People " website with about a dozen new people. Someone (I have absolutely no idea who) suggested that I'd make a good addition to the page, so there's Read More...
Posted Monday, May 02, 2005 1:52 PM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments
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Playing Audio CDs, part 7 - DAE Table of contents.

So now this series comes to the "fun" part, DAE. DAE stands for "Digital Audio Extraction", it means reading the raw audio data from the CDROM. Over the next couple of articles, this will turn into the most complicated code I've ever attempted to drop Read More...
Posted Monday, May 02, 2005 12:56 PM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments
 
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