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October 2007 - Posts

What happens when audio rendering fails?

Skywing sent me an email earlier today asking me essentially "Why doesn't Windows do a better job of handling the case where the default audio device goes away?"[1] It's a good question, and one that we've spent a lot of time working on for quite some Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 31, 2007 1:58 PM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments
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An Overview of Windows Sound and "Glitching" Issues

Nick White over at the Windows Vista Blog just posted an article written by Steve Ball , the PM in charge of the sounds team. It does a pretty good job of covering why my $2000 PCs sometimes glitches like crazy, while my $20 CD player works perfectly Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 30, 2007 4:49 PM by LarryOsterman | 30 Comments
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Why do people think that Windows is "easy"?

Every once in a while, someone sends me mail (or a pointer to a blog post) and asks "Why can't you guys do something like that ? ". The implication seems to be that Windows would be so much better if we simply rewrote the operating system using technology Read More...
Posted Monday, October 29, 2007 10:06 AM by LarryOsterman | 47 Comments

"Memory Leak" when using the Vista Audio API notification routines

We recently got an internal report from someone using the internal audio notification APIs that they were leaking memory and they wanted to help from us debugging the problem. I took a look and discovered that the problem was a circular reference that Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 24, 2007 2:40 PM by LarryOsterman | 17 Comments

Every threat model diagram should tell a story.

Adam Shostack has another threat modeling post up on the SDL blog entitled " Threat Modeling Self Checks and Rules of Thumb ". In it, he talks about threat models and diagrams (and he corrects a mistake in my " rules of thumb " post (thanks Adam)). There's Read More...
Posted Monday, October 22, 2007 3:14 PM by LarryOsterman | 1 Comments
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The evolution of a data structure - the WAVEFORMAT.

In the beginning, there was a need to be able to describe the format contained in a stream of audio data. And thus the WAVEFORMAT structure was born in Windows 3.1. typedef struct WAVEFORMAT { WORD wFormatTag; WORD nChannels; DWORD nSamplesPerSec; DWORD Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 18, 2007 3:13 PM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments
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Larry and the "Ping of Death"

Also known as "Larry mounts a DDOS attack against every single machine running Windows NT" Or: No stupid mistake goes unremembered. I was recently in the office of a very senior person at Microsoft debugging a problem on his machine. He introduced himself, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 16, 2007 9:36 AM by LarryOsterman | 33 Comments

Sorry about not posting...

Work got a bit insane last week (work fell on me like a ton of bricks), then on Thursday I left to go on a vacation to visit family back east, so no posts in a while. On the other hand, we all had a great time, and got to meet up with the family. One Read More...
Posted Monday, October 15, 2007 5:38 PM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments
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Hold on, I know this "old guy"...

Last week, I'd noticed headlines about a California appeals court reinstating an age discrimination suit brought by a "Google manager" . I sort-of ignored it, because I thought it didn't affect me in any meaningful way. Then this morning, I ran into Lauren Read More...
Posted Monday, October 08, 2007 1:02 PM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments
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Must my service name have the name of the executable in which it's contained?

It must be psychic debugging week 'round here. I received the following email on an internal mailing list earlier today: Regarding windows service with ServiceType “SERVICE_WIN32_SHARE_PROCESS”, is there a restriction on the service name such that it Read More...
Posted Friday, October 05, 2007 10:13 AM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

The Windows command line is just a string...

Yesterday, Richard Gemmell left the following comment on my blog (I've trimmed to the critical part): I was referring to the way that IE can be tricked into calling the Firefox command line with multiple parameters instead of the single parameter registered Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 03, 2007 9:01 AM by LarryOsterman | 30 Comments
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Some final thoughts on Threat Modeling...

I want to wrap up the threat modeling posts with a summary and some comments on the entire process. Yeah, I know I should have done this last week, but I got distracted :). First, a summary of the threat modeling posts: Part 1: Threat Modeling, Once again. Read More...
Posted Monday, October 01, 2007 9:54 AM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments
 
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