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June 2005 - Posts

What's wrong with this code, part 13 - the answers

I loved this particular "What's wrong" because it was quite subtle (and real world). One of the developers on the audio team came to me the other day and complained that the assert in CFooBase::~CFooBase was firing. I looked at the source for a few minutes, Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 30, 2005 10:43 AM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part lucky 13

Today's example is a smidge long, I've stripped out everything I can possibly imagine stripping out to reduce size. This is a very real world example that we recently hit - only the names have been changed to protect the innocent. I've used the built-in Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 29, 2005 10:17 AM by LarryOsterman | 35 Comments

Chimney sweeping

Sorry, nothing technical's coming to mind (I'm utterly swamped with work related stuff), but I just had to vent. Sharron's going to camp next week, so once again we're doing the "label everything that Sharron owns" ritual. Neither Valorie or I are particularly Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 28, 2005 9:53 AM by LarryOsterman | 20 Comments
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How many computers does it take to make a Microsoft employee happy

Over the weekend, it seems like a mini-meme went through http://blogs.msdn.com , "How many computers does it take to make a Microsoft employee happy". Normally I don't do meme's but enough people have asked this question privately that... What machines Read More...
Posted Monday, June 27, 2005 2:25 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Why is the DOS path character "\"?

Many, many months ago, Declan Eardly asked why the \ character was chosen as the path separator. The answer's from before my time, but I do remember the original reasons. It all stems from Microsoft's relationship with IBM. For DOS 1.0, DOS only supported Read More...
Posted Friday, June 24, 2005 3:15 PM by LarryOsterman | 28 Comments

Why is defense in depth so important?

Yesterday's post on the principal of least privilege engendered some discussion about how important the PLP was. Many of the commentors (including Skywing, the originator of the discussion) felt that it wasn't important because malware could always enable Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 23, 2005 11:45 AM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments
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Why did I say that the Date&Time control panel applet was a security hole waiting to happen?

In response to a comment I'd made on Raymond's post about the Date/Time CPL : And what's even neater is that it's a security hole waiting to happen - the reason the dialog pops up when you're a LUA user is that they're enabling the set date&time privilege Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 22, 2005 12:33 PM by LarryOsterman | 22 Comments

Something I learned the other day...

I have a mild allergy to theatrical makeup (powder in particular). Go figure that one. Yes, it's a tease. And no, I'm not telling (until people figure out the tease). Why? Because I've been asked to keep it under my hat. But the reason is out there. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 21, 2005 11:47 AM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Hey, I'm an author too!

Joel just sent me an email letting me know that the first edition of " Best Software Writing, I " has now gone live. I'm quite honored to have have had one of my blog posts ( Larry's rules of software engineering #2: Measuring Testers by Test Metrics Read More...
Posted Monday, June 20, 2005 1:32 PM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments

Michael's finally writing the nitty gritty details of DllLoad

I don't normally post on weekends, but I just noticed that Michael Grier 's finally started posting his " How does the NT loader work " series. His second post, on the basic operation of the loader is also up. Michael sent out a doc internally on Thursday Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 18, 2005 1:04 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Nathan's laws of software

Way back in 1997, Nathan Myhrvold (CTO of Microsoft at the time) wrote a paper entitled " The Next Fifty Years of Software " (Subtitled "Software: The Crisis Continues!") which was presented at the ACM97 conference (focused on the next 50 years of computing). Read More...
Posted Friday, June 17, 2005 11:58 AM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

The dirty little secret of Windows volume

Here's a dirty little secret about volume in Windows. If you look at the documentation for waveOutSetVolume it very clearly says: Volume settings are interpreted logarithmically. This means the perceived increase in volume is the same when increasing Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 16, 2005 12:07 PM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments

What's in an audio volume?

I've been talking about audio controls - volumes and mutes and the like, but one of the more confusing things I've run into here at work is the concept of "volume". First off, what IS volume? Well, roughly speaking (and I know the audiophiles out there Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 15, 2005 1:39 PM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments

Mapping audio topologies to mixer topologies

Yesterday , I described the internal topology of an audio card. But there's no Windows API to expose that topology directly (you can generate the topology using the KS IOCTLs (KS stands for Kernel Streaming) but the reality is that it's not an API for Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 14, 2005 12:47 PM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments

What's in your audio card?

No, it's not a credit card (obscure reference to a current credit card campaign running here in the US). One of the things that really surprised me when I joined this group is the complexity of an audio adapter. I had figured that an audio adapter was Read More...
Posted Monday, June 13, 2005 7:06 PM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments

Venting steam

Ok, today I'm going to vent a bit... This has been an extraordinarily frustrating week (that's a large part of why I've had virtually no technical content this week). Think of this one as a peek behind the curtain into a bit of what happens behind the Read More...
Posted Friday, June 10, 2005 12:51 PM by LarryOsterman | 19 Comments

Hacking Billy

I love it when I come into work in the morning and I find something in my email that just screams "write about me". As a couple of people have commented, I have a LOT of toys in my office. I love collecting them, they're just a huge amount of fun. One Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 09, 2005 12:24 PM by LarryOsterman | 20 Comments

@@#$@# License plates...

Nothing technical today, just a bit of "a day in the life"... So I'm heading home last night, driving up Avondale Road, and I hear a noise. Sort of a rattle, rattle, thump, kerthud, then nothing. I figure, no big deal, I went over something. But it was Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 08, 2005 12:10 PM by LarryOsterman | 25 Comments

The Endian of Windows

Rick's got a great post on what big and little endian are, and what the Apple switch has to do with Word for the Mac. In the comments, Alicia asked about Windows... I tried to make this a comment on his blog but the server wouldn't take it. The answer Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 07, 2005 12:45 PM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments

When new features expose old bugs.

Not quite "Riffing on Raymond" but he just wrote about this, and it reminded me of a story that was related to me by the dev lead for the security team (the guys who own the LSA and authentication in Windows, not the SWI team) here at Microsoft. Raymond Read More...
Posted Monday, June 06, 2005 11:34 AM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

My office guest chair

Adam writes about his office guest chair . Microsoft's a big company, and, like all big company has all sorts of silly rules of what you can have in your office. One of them is that for office furniture, you get: A desk chair One PED (sort of a mobile Read More...
Posted Friday, June 03, 2005 12:34 PM by LarryOsterman | 29 Comments

Error Code Paradigms

At some point when I was reading the comments on the " Exceptions as repackaged error codes " post, I had an epiphany (it's reflected in the comments to that thread but I wanted to give it more visibility). I'm sure it's just an indication of just how Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 02, 2005 1:38 PM by LarryOsterman | 33 Comments

My favorite error code

Yesterday I'd mentioned X.400 OM error codes. Originally, the primary message transport for Exchange was an x.400 transport (this changed with Exchange 2000). At one point, one of the Exchange MTA developers told me about his favorite x.400 error code: Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 01, 2005 11:48 AM by LarryOsterman | 4 Comments
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