Contents tagged with Programming
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Software Quality, Then and Now
Long before I was creator of software products, I was a space geek. When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, my parents said their three-year old boy was fascinated. I closely followed every phase of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975. In 1981, two friends and I petitioned NASA to allow us to "cover" the first launch of the space shuttle Columbia.
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Balloon Timeout and Notification Duration
Today I was reading a new post on one of my favorite blogs, The Old New Thing by longtime Microsoft developer Raymond Chen. I got to know Raymond in the waning days of 1994 when we were working on "Chicago", the codename for what would become Windows 95. I was a rookie Program Manager for this new thing called "accessibility" and he was the go-to developer for just about anything in the guts of Windows.
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Microsoft Windows Internals Review
I’ve always been a bit twiddler – whether it’s doing machine code on an 8-bit RCA COSMAC microprocessor or writing 16-bit drivers for Windows 3.1 or doing Windows Server 2003 storage related development, I’ve never shied away from getting into the meat of the system.
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Thoughts from IBM System/360 40th birthday party
Last night I went to the party at Mountain View's Computer History Museum hosted by IBM. I figured it would be a low key affair with other curious folks like me. Nope the parking lot was full and the lecture hall packed. Had several laughs listening to Fred Brooks talk about the development of the System/360. Fred’s the author of “The Mythical Man-Month”, one of the great project management books. He also was the manager of the Job Control Language (JCL), which he terms “the worst programming language ever.”
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Linux won't stay up for longer than 16 months?
Apparently until recently, the Linux kernal value that measures “uptime” was a 32 bit number. Uptime is measured in centiseconds (.01) and thus after 497 days, 2 hours, 27 minutes and 53 seconds, the counter wraps around to zero. Doing a Google search on “Linux uptime 497“ produced a number of folks who encountered the issue and discussions about it.
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Chuck installs Linux while watching pigs fly
I never thought I'd be doing this. As of 9:10am, Tuesday March 2, 2004, I have just started the installation of Linux on my IBM ThinkPad X20 laptop. Egads!
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Is rebooting a cure all?
I hate rebooting. Most people do. All too often though, it's the only way to get running again. Think it's a problem only to Microsoft Windows? Imagine having to do 130 reboots before you could get working again. That’s what NASA’s Mars rover Spirit had to do when it ran out of memory on January 21, 2003.
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Programming Directory Services with Microsoft .NET and XML
As many of you know, I wrote a popular developers book on Active Directory for Microsoft Press titled Microsoft Windows 2000 Active Directory Programming. When it was published in April 2001, I pleaded with Microsoft Press to not put “Windows 2000” into the title of the book, as it would seem obsolete when the next version of the Windows Server came out.
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Learning Perl
I'm finally learning the Perl language. Being a Microsoft guy for so long, I really stuck with C/C++/C#, VB, VB.NET and VBScript. I even wrote client-side scripting in JScript and not JavaScript. :-)