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BillG Memories, Part 2

Not surprisingly, as a peon, I don’t get to interact with Bill very often, so my few interactions are almost by definition memorable. I’ve posted this story before , but it deserves to be recycled in honor of Bill’s last few days. This happened back in Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 01, 2008 4:44 PM by LarryOsterman | 22 Comments

BillG Memories, part 1…

I’m going to be out of town tomorrow, so I won’t be able to post this on Bill’s last full time day at Microsoft, but I wanted to post a couple of anecdotes about Bill. This one actually comes from Valorie, it was her first interaction with Bill…   Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 26, 2008 11:09 AM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments

News Flash: Spaces are legal characters in both filenames and passwords!

I recently figured out a problem that I've been having with one of our internal tools. The tool is used to automatically deploy our daily builds (extremely handy when you're doing that every other day to several test machines). As a part of the tool, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 03, 2008 3:34 PM by LarryOsterman | 33 Comments

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

How do I compare two different NetBIOS names?

On one of our internal aliases, someone asked the following question: [i]s there any API that I can use to do case insensitive comparison of two OEM strings? (NetBIOS names are encoded in OEMCP.) Wow, that's question was a blast from the past. Windows Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 11, 2007 1:05 PM by LarryOsterman | 10 Comments
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FPO

I was chatting with one of the perf guys last week and he mentioned something that surprised me greatly. Apparently he's having perf issues that appear to be associated with a 3rd party driver. Unfortunately, he's having problems figuring out what's going Read More...
Posted Monday, March 12, 2007 9:44 AM by LarryOsterman | 22 Comments

Vista Ship Gift, Part 2

It's a Microsoft tradition that the people who worked on a project get a copy of the project when it ships. I've got copies of OS/2 1.1, NT 3.1, Exchange 4.0, 5.0, 5.5 and 2000 on my shelves, for example, all with their shrinkwrap untouched. Well, my Read More...
Posted Friday, February 09, 2007 10:16 AM by LarryOsterman | 23 Comments
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Why was the ability to specify an allocator during CoInitialize removed from the system?

Yesterday I talked about CoGetMalloc . One thing I didn't include was why the ability to specify an allocator was removed from the system. If you've read Raymond's blog, the answer should be obvious. I suspected it, but wasn't sure, but after I submitted Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 08, 2007 12:30 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

The Sad Story of CoGetMalloc

Ok, I admit it. I'm a geek. I'm actually one of those people who rants over the loss of the printed version of the platform SDK documentation (I still have some of the original Win32 Platform SDK documents in my office and use them regularly). One of Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 07, 2007 10:39 AM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

Remembering old CPU bugs.

I was browsing through the Bonus Chapters for Raymond's book and I remembered an old CPU bug we encountered with the early 286 processors. Back in those days, it was common to manipulate the processor directly, especially from inside the operating system. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 06, 2007 12:45 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

What is AUDIODG.EXE?

One of the new audio components in Vista is a new process named audiodg.exe. If you look at it in taskmgr, the description shows "Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation", but that's not really particularly helpful when it comes to figuring out what it does. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 31, 2007 2:46 PM by LarryOsterman | 41 Comments

Vista Ship Gifts

Our ship gifts for Vista came the other day. We got a fleece pullover and the final DVD for our DVD cube. Fully updated, the cube is a collection of 4 DVDs, containing the bits for Vista Beta1, Vista Beta2, Vista RC1, and Vista RTM. There's also a booklet: Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 30, 2007 11:38 AM by LarryOsterman | 19 Comments

Nostalgia Waxes

So apparently there's something going on today in New York City (I don't know what it is, since I'm not invited :)). However, a couple of weeks ago, someone dug up a piece of Microsoft nostalgia and posted it on Google Videos. I saw the first couple of Read More...
Posted Monday, January 29, 2007 8:59 AM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments
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It's Bedlam all over again...

A really long time ago, I wrote a post about the " Bedlam DL3 " event at Microsoft. Well, a couple of days ago, we had another Bedlam DL3 event. For some reason, the permissions on one of our internal DLs were messed up, and someone had granted "send-as" Read More...
Posted Monday, September 18, 2006 10:12 AM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments
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