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Fixing a customer problem: “No Audio Device is Installed” when launching sndvol on Windows Vista

Yesterday someone forwarded me an email from one of our DirectShow MVPs – he was having problems playing audio on his Windows Vista machine.   Fortunately David (the MVP) had done most of the diagnostic work – the symptoms he saw were that he was Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 06, 2009 11:26 AM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

I get spam :)

I just received this spam message the other day: From: Microsoft [mailto:customerservice@microsoft.com] Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2008 11:13 PM To: Larry Osterman Subject: Security Update for OS Microsoft Windows Dear Microsoft Customer, Please notice Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 14, 2008 9:13 AM by LarryOsterman | 18 Comments

Think Geek Responds

Valorie just received the following email from Think Geek ( in response to our previous issue with them ): From: Caroline Offutt [mailto:<email address at thinkgeek.com>] Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2007 7:05 PM To: <valorie's email address> Read More...
Posted Monday, November 19, 2007 11:19 AM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

How to lose customers without really trying...

Not surprisingly, Valorie and I both do some of our holiday season shopping at ThinkGeek. But no longer. Valorie recently placed a substantial order with them, but Instead of processing her order, they sent the following email: From: ThinkGeek Customer Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 15, 2007 3:21 PM by LarryOsterman | 25 Comments

A snapshot of a developers morning...

Wednesday evening, I went to a local computer store and bought a new 250G SATA drive for my dev machine. Yesterday morning, I tried to install it. I was a little bit apprehensive - my dev machine already has 2 IDE hard disks in it, and although the motherboard Read More...
Posted Friday, March 16, 2007 9:17 AM by LarryOsterman | 23 Comments

Mother, Can I?

Recently someone posted the attached screen shot on the internal self hosting alias. What's wrong with this English? It's the use of "Can" instead of "May". This happens to be one of my minor pet peeves with common English usage. The difference between Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 17, 2006 9:37 AM by LarryOsterman | 45 Comments

Looking under rocks...

I've really been enjoying Jensen Harris's blog recently, he's been talking about the UI design that went into Office 12. Today's post (on turning over rocks) is no different, reading it brought a smile to my face, mostly because of this paragraph: I don't Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 11, 2005 10:19 AM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

Hacking the Decsystem 20

A bit of truly ancient history today, and it's not even Microsoft related. Back when I was in college, we did all our class work on Decsystem 20's running TOPS-20. I've got to say that the dec20 is STILL my favorite processor architecture, even if it Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 05, 2005 12:23 PM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

WHat's wrong with this code, part 9 (File Copy) - the answers

Wow, where to begin on this one. Lets start with the easy one, the simple coding error. Here it is: // // Account for data read. // dataBlock->dataLengthWritten->QuadPart += dataBlock->readLength; The problem with this is that 64bit math isn't Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 10, 2005 10:02 AM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

The consequences of ignoring nagling and delayed acks

Over most of this week, I’ve discussed how ignoring the underlying network architecture can radically hurt an application . Now it’s time for a war story about how things can go awry if you don’t notice these things. One of the basic Read More...
Posted Friday, August 06, 2004 5:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 6 Comments
 
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