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What's wrong with this code, part 21 - A Psychic Debugging Example - The answers.

So for the past couple of posts , I've been walking through a psychic debugging experience I had over the weekend. As I presented the problem, there were three pieces of information needed to debug the problem. An interface: class IPsychicInterface { Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 26, 2007 1:17 PM by LarryOsterman | 10 Comments

What's wrong with this code, Part 21 - A psychic debugging example: The missing piece

As I mentioned yesterday , one of the other developers in my group had hit a sticky problem, and he asked me for my opinion on what was going wrong. There were 3 pieces of information that I needed to use to diagnose the problem, I gave you two of them Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 25, 2007 9:39 AM by LarryOsterman | 18 Comments

So why are applets so bad, anyway?

There's a simple answer to that question. As I mentioned in the first post in this series, "It's my machine dagnabbit". The simple answer is that applets consume resources that can be better used by by the customer. At an absolute minimum, each applet Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 15, 2007 2:28 PM by LarryOsterman | 29 Comments

Why do people write applets?

Since I spend so much time railing about applets, I also tend to look at applets to see what they do (after all, the first step in knowing how to defeat the enemy is to understand the enemy). In general, applets seem to fall into several rough categories: Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 14, 2007 11:03 AM by LarryOsterman | 39 Comments

Missed metaphors

Not surprisingly, the various teams that contribute to the Windows product have been hard at work planning what goes into potential future versions of Windows. As a part of that planning process, we've been collecting all sorts of data, and sifting through Read More...
Posted Friday, June 01, 2007 9:03 AM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments

So when is it ok to use SEH?

I got an email from someone using the contacts form asking: There is an article on MSDN about using VirtualAlloc to reserve then commit memory pages. Here is the link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/memory/base/reserving_and_committing_memory.asp Read More...
Posted Monday, October 16, 2006 11:36 AM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Replacing operations with developers

I'm swamped right now (the perils of live-blogging), but instead of finishing up the half written post I have at the top of the queue, I wanted to point to two posts from Dare Obasanjo entitled " Replacing Operations with Developers " and " Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 09, 2006 1:42 PM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments

Breaking into Apple

Larry's in a curmudgeonly mood today, so... Over the weekend, I noticed this post on Digg: " How I learned to break into Apple and Code for them without Permission ". It's an "interesting" story, and I have to say that I was aghast when I read it. And Read More...
Posted Monday, August 07, 2006 10:57 AM by LarryOsterman | 24 Comments

Riffing on Raymond - When caches hurt

On Tuesday, Raymond posted " A cache with a bad policy is another name for a memory leak ". Of course that immediately reminded me of a war story from back in the days of Exchange 5.0. One of the major features of Exchange 5.0 was an NNTP server. Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 04, 2006 9:35 AM by LarryOsterman | 12 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

Still more misinformation about virtual memory and paging files

The wired network in my building's being unusually flakey so I'm posting this from my laptop, sorry for the brevety.. Slashdot had a front page story today about an article be Adrian Wong posted in his Rojak Pot: " Virtual Memory Optimization Guide ". Read More...
Posted Friday, March 25, 2005 1:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 25 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 10 - the answers

Yesterday's article was a bit of a trick question, but was a real world example. Our group encountered this in some code we were testing last week (in some pre-production code - it was not part of any product). Somewhat surprisingly, it turns out that Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 16, 2005 11:59 AM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 6

Today, let’s look at a trace log writer. It’s the kind of thing that you’d find in many applications; it simply does a printf and writes its output to a log file. In order to have maximum flexibility, the code re-opens the file every time the application Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 08, 2004 4:39 PM by LarryOsterman | 45 Comments
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