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I get more spam :)

I just received this phishing letter, I liked it simply because it was so remarkably brazen: -- Dear Webmail User, This message was sent automatically by a program on Webmail which periodically checks the size of inbox, where new messages are received. Read More...
Posted Friday, November 21, 2008 4:58 PM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments

What’s wrong with this code, part 25

Wow, 25 already. This one’s pretty straightforward. Once again, it’s a UI issue, since I’ve been spending most of my time doing UI lately. In this particular case, the code comes from the constructor for an auto-layout class that is used internally in Read More...
Posted Monday, November 17, 2008 8:43 AM by LarryOsterman | 10 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 | 17 Comments

What’s wrong with this code part 24 (From an MSDN article)?

I ran into this bug earlier today and realized that it’d make an awesome “What’s wrong with this code”. I started pulling together a test app when I realized that this MSDN magazine article contains sample code that perfectly exhibits the bug: CRect rectangle; Read More...
Posted Monday, October 06, 2008 4:52 PM by LarryOsterman | 23 Comments

What’s wrong with this code, Part 23 – The Answers

My last post was all about a problem with what appeared to be some really simple ATL code. It turns out that the problem was easier than I had expected.  James Skimming came up with the answer on the second comment.  The problem here was that Read More...
Posted Monday, September 08, 2008 3:19 PM by LarryOsterman | 21 Comments

What’s wrong with this code, Part 23..

I recently tracked down a bug that was causing problems in my code.  Once I figured out the bug, I realized it made a good “what’s wrong with this code”… #include "stdafx.h" #include <mmdeviceapi.h> IMMDeviceEnumerator *GetDeviceEnumerator() Read More...
Posted Friday, September 05, 2008 8:45 AM by LarryOsterman | 26 Comments

What’s wrong with this code, part 22 – Drawing Text…

Recently I’ve been working on something that I’ve never done before in my almost 24 years at Microsoft.    For the past 23ish years, I’ve been a plumber – all the work I’ve done has been under the covers.  But for the next version of Windows, Read More...
Posted Friday, August 01, 2008 3:07 PM by LarryOsterman | 43 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

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

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

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

What's wrong with this code, part 21, a psychic debugging example

Over the weekend, one of the developers in my group sent me some mail - he was seeing one of the registers in his code getting corrupted across a procedure call. He was quite surprised to see this, and asked me for any suggestions. With the help of the Read More...
Posted Monday, September 24, 2007 4:41 PM by LarryOsterman | 48 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
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