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Riffing on Raymond - Network performance...

I keep on doing this, clearly it's evidence of a lack of imagination on my part... Raymond's post a while ago discussed some of the problems with network latency (no, I'm not going to touch that particular can of worms). It's amazing how many people don't Read More...
Posted Monday, May 08, 2006 4:00 PM by LarryOsterman | 10 Comments

Riffing on Raymond - Splay Trees

Raymond's post today on splay trees (brief summary: splay trees are interesting, but when you do an in-order traversal, they degrade to a linked list) reminded me of some "fun" I had with the NT 3.1 browser. The browser service is mostly dead these days, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 18, 2006 9:37 AM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments

Young Turks

Ok, this is a bit of a rant. I recently encountered an email exchange from someone I respect where the person in question asked (more-or-less) "I can't, for the life of me, see why on earth this particular piece of functionality exists in Windows". Now Read More...
Posted Monday, January 16, 2006 10:46 AM by LarryOsterman | 39 Comments

The dreaded "beeping death"

Anyone who's been at Microsoft for long enough (long enough to use DOS on a day-to-day basis) remembers the deadly "beeping death". The "beeping death" was an artifact of the MS-NET product that we deployed for networking here at Microsoft, and I was Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 09, 2005 8:57 AM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

Why no Easter Eggs?

Yesterday's post caused a bit of a furor in the comments thread. A large number of people leaving comments (and others ) didn't understand why the OS division has a "no Easter Eggs" policy. If you think about this, it's not really that surprising. One Read More...
Posted Friday, October 21, 2005 2:47 PM by LarryOsterman | 32 Comments

Unintended consequences of adding APIs to the system

Yesterday, I wrote about a trick to reduce the number of bits in a number by one. It turns out that I've only ever had one opportunity to use this trick (although I ran into an instance of it when code reviewing some stuff the other day), back when I Read More...
Posted Friday, October 14, 2005 10:10 AM by LarryOsterman | 31 Comments

It's on the whiteboard

Way back when, when we were first shipping NT 3.1, checking files into the source tree was pretty easy. You made your changes and checked them in. Not a big deal, since there were only 20 or so people working on the code base - the chances of collision Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 12, 2005 1:59 PM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

Where do "checked" and "free" come from?

People who have MSDN or the DDK know that Windows is typically built in two different flavors, "Checked" and "Free". The primary difference between the two is that the "checked" build has traces and asserts, but the free build doesn't. Where did those Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 31, 2005 10:44 AM by LarryOsterman | 24 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

Anatomy of a software bug, part 2 - the NT browser

Yesterday , I talked about the design of the NT browser service. Today, I want to talk about a really subtle bug we ended up finding in the service (fixed long before we shipped NT 3.1). As a brief refresher from yesterdays post, the NT browser was effectively Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 12, 2005 11:07 AM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments

Hiding Complexity

In a comment on yesterday's post, Manip asked: Larry: You said Macros work to hide the complexity and say so like it is a bad thing.. ? Excuse me but I thought that was the POINT of using a Macro.. Actually, in the world in which I live (writing systems Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 01, 2004 10:37 AM by LarryOsterman | 22 Comments

So why didn't the Windows guys just remove the AARD code from the system?

In yesterday’s post I talked about the AARD code. One of the questions that perennially comes up is “Why on earth didn’t the Windows guys just remove that code”? Well, the answer is that it would have likely broken far more code Read More...
Posted Friday, August 13, 2004 6:49 PM by LarryOsterman | 1 Comments

It's the platform, Silly!

I’ve been mulling writing this one for a while, and I ran into the comment below the other day which inspired me to go further, so here goes. Back in May, Jim Gosling was interviewed by Asia Computer Weekly . In the interview, he commented: One Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 07, 2004 7:04 PM by LarryOsterman | 69 Comments

Obfuscated code...

I recently ran into this post from Alex Papadimoulis’s “Daily WTF”, and it reminded me of one company’s response to mandatory source disclosure (no, this isn’t really another open source discussion, really – I’ve Read More...
Posted Friday, May 28, 2004 5:15 PM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

Software archaeology

There are times that I think my job is the same as an archeologist. Rick touched on this a bit on his “ Anatomy of a Software Bug ” post (an excellent read, btw, if you haven’t already seen it). Code, like people, gets old. And, just Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 20, 2004 3:49 PM by LarryOsterman | 17 Comments
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