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July 2005 - Posts

Cool article about Honk! at SCT in the local newspaper.

Last week, we got a phone call from the local newspaper (the Woodinville Weekly), they were doing a story on the SCT summer season and the kids in the Woodinville area that are appearing in shows there. We arranged for the reporter and Daniel to talk Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 28, 2005 8:08 AM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments
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Oh yeah - We shipped Beta1 today...

It feels wierd, because I don't normally jump on the "everyone in the world is blogging about it" bandwagon, but we shipped LH Beta1 today! Yipee! And Scoble has a great interview with Chris Jones up on channel 9. I thought the sour look that quickly Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 27, 2005 5:02 PM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments
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Words I dislike - Policy

A while back, I wrote about how I disliked the word " Robustness " because it's meaning was so vague. Another word that I dislike (for similar reasons) is "Policy". As I mentioned in my " We've RI'ed " post, I was asked to work on the "audio policy" infrastructure Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 27, 2005 8:39 AM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

Making time go faster

I got the following email the other day from a reader: I cam across your post on pc time and thought you may have a quick answer. Thanks in advance. I have a program that is a reader that reads a log and sends a message to a second program that is the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 26, 2005 9:07 AM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments

We've RI'ed, part 2

In November of 2002, the SCP project (to build a controller ship for home automation) was winding down. As happens when projects end-of-life, one of the things that management does is to divvy up the members of the team - sometimes the lead takes a bunch Read More...
Posted Monday, July 25, 2005 3:56 PM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments
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Seattle Childrens Theater Summer Season

As I mentioned earlier , Daniel's appearing in SCT's summer season production of Honk! . He'll be playing the part of Bullfrog, which is a mostly comic relief role (and he gets a killer song). The kids involved in the summer season performances have been Read More...
Posted Friday, July 22, 2005 9:44 AM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments
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UUIDs are only unique if you generate them...

We had an internal discussion recently and the upshot of the discussion was that it turns out that some distributed component on the web appears to have used the UUID of a sample COM component. Sigh. I wonder sometimes why people do this. It's not like Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 21, 2005 10:13 AM by LarryOsterman | 28 Comments

Clippy Lives!

My boss just sent me this blog post from a friend of his. The language is a bit rough, but I came close to spewing soda (pop for those of you in Piksburgh, coke for those of you in Atlanta) all over my monitor. http://www.caseytime.com/index.cgi/2005/07#mom_and_paperclip Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 21, 2005 8:32 AM by LarryOsterman | 6 Comments
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Remember the blibbet

There was a thread on Channel9 that got me to remember the blibbet. "The blibbet?" What on earth is a blibbet? The blibbet is the "O" in the 2nd Microsoft logo: Those of us who've been at Microsoft for a long time all have fond memories of the blibbet, Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 14, 2005 6:57 AM by LarryOsterman | 32 Comments
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Beware of the dancing bunnies.

I saw a post the other day (I'm not sure where, otherwise I'd cite it) that proclaimed that a properly designed system didn't need any anti-virus or anti-spyware software. Forgive me, but this comment is about as intellegent as "I can see a worldwide Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 12, 2005 10:27 PM by LarryOsterman | 53 Comments
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What's wrong with this code, part 14 - the answers

Yesterday's post was a classic example of Joel Spolsky's Law of Leaky Abstractions . Why? Well, because it was an example of conflicting contracts. In COM, the contract for an API is defined by the APIs interface. In this case, it was: [ object, uuid("0A0DDEDC-C422-4BB3-9869-4FED020B66C5"), Read More...
Posted Friday, July 08, 2005 12:08 PM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 14

Keeping up with the "theme" of COM related bad code examples, here's another real-world example. To avoid any ATL confusion, it's 100% pure C++. Our test team rolled out a new set of tests last week and immediately hit this one. The funny thing is that Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 07, 2005 9:37 AM by LarryOsterman | 32 Comments

What I did on the 4th of July...

I originally wasn't going to write this up, but Valorie thought it was a cute story. I need to describe some terminology first. Here on the Windows team, we call a full build of Windows a "timebuild" - normally, you don't build the entire Windows product Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 06, 2005 10:08 AM by LarryOsterman | 20 Comments

Should developers learn crypto?

Over the weekend, Paul Maher posted an article in which he asked if developers needed to understand cryptography. I responded in his comments, but it needs a bit more detail than I provided in the comments. I'm all for developers learning about crypto. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 05, 2005 10:30 AM by LarryOsterman | 20 Comments

Private Destructors

Yesterday, I mentioned that Michael Ruck had complained that I'd made the destructor on my CFooBase class private, and he wondered why on earth I had done it. Skywing answered in the comments but it bears a bit more discussion. The simple answer to why Read More...
Posted Friday, July 01, 2005 9:05 AM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments
 
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