December 2004 - Posts
I should have known.
I was at an important client meeting yesterday, and we got into a discussion over what was there and not there in a two sets of text files. The first set was given to me perhaps a couple of months ago, and contained way more data than I needed, as well as duplicates. The other set of files was given to me within the last couple of weeks. I was insistant that certain names and numbers that were present in the first set of files were not in the second set, based upon my use of Windows Explorer search. Of course, there was only one problem: Explorer was not really searching the second set of files, since they were given to me with a .DAT extension rather than the .TXT extension that the first set had been. Explorer does not search files with an extension that is not registered. Here you can fix this "feature". I looked rather silly, I fear, when I had to sheepishly admit I had been bitten by this (again).
This default behavior should be fixed. At least a message should be prominently displayed when you ask Windows to search for *.dat files for a given bit of text, and Windows knows that it will not search those files.
Yes, at some level I know about this, and have patched other installs of Windows to search correctly, but this machine had been recently repaved, and I simply did not think about the different extension on the second set of files.
Sigh.
I have an acquaintance who has done me some favors at a client site who figured I would have some insight into where to get an XBox for Christmas (this is for her brother's son, the brother who was the only one of 6 siblings who helped her when their mother was ill recently). Sadly, I am really clueless about xbox in particular and games in general.
So, if you have any idea of where to get an XBox for Christmas, please do let me know. Thanks!
Windows System Programming, 3rd Edition by Johnson M. Hart is the sort of book that you might not need, but if you do need it, you need it bad. It is a C++ oriented book that goes into the details of all the Win32 details that you might ever need. It covers things like Thread Synchronization, Memory Mapped Files, Exception Handling, Interprocess Communications and Services. There is also a section on Win64.
Given that many folks in the Windows world are migrating to the .NET framework, which masks some of the Win32 details, as I said, you may not need this book. However, if you need to wring out the last little bit of performance, or especially if you need to venture into areas not well covered by the .NET Framework (such as Security), this is an excellent book to have nearby.
In the interest of full disclosure, I was one of a number of tech editors on this book. The tech edit process on this book was amazingly thorough, with multiple revisions reviewed by a number of tech editors. The end result is a very cool book for folks who need to get the most out of Win32.
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