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January 2005 - Posts

Transfering a pointer across processes

I seem to be "Riffing on Raymond " more and more these days, I'm not sure why, but.. Raymond Chen's post today on the type model for Win64 got me to thinking about one comment he made in particular: Notice that in these inter-process communication scenarios, Read More...
Posted Monday, January 31, 2005 9:21 AM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments
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What does "Robust" mean?

Back in the days of NT OS/2, one of the things that was absolutely drilled into the development team was robustness. I even went so far as to write "Robustness" on my whiteboard in 1 foot high letters as a daily reminder. The team distributed mugs with Read More...
Posted Friday, January 28, 2005 11:36 AM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

Interesting commentary on Washington State's election...

I don't normally do political commentary in this blog - its' a technical blog, not a political blog, and there are enough of those blogs out there anyway, but... For those of you not in Washington State, during the November election, Republican Dino Rossi Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 27, 2005 5:38 PM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments
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Another example of programming style

Brad Abrams over on the CLR team just published an article containing the CLR team's internal coding conventions . It makes an interesting counterpoint to my " what is programming style " series from back in November. I can't say I agree with everything Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 27, 2005 10:00 AM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

What is localization anyway?

I may be stomping on Michael Kaplan's toes with this one, but... I was reading the February 2005 issue of Dr. Dobbs Journal this morning and I ran into the article " Automating Localization " by Hew Wolff (you may have to subscribe to get access to the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 26, 2005 12:26 PM by LarryOsterman | 27 Comments

Keeping kids safe on the internet

Joe Wilcox over at Microsoft Monitor recently posted an article about keeping kids safe on the internet . It’s a good article, but I’d add one other thing to his suggestions: If you’ve got more than one computer in your house, disable internet access Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 25, 2005 2:20 PM by LarryOsterman | 21 Comments

Why is Control-Alt-Delete the secure attention sequence (SAS)?

When we were designing NT 3.1, one of the issues that came up fairly early was the secure attention sequence - we needed to have a keystroke sequence that couldn't be intercepted by any application. So the security architect for NT (Jim Kelly) went looking Read More...
Posted Monday, January 24, 2005 4:04 PM by LarryOsterman | 47 Comments
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XP and Systems Programming

In Raymond's blog post today , he mentioned that if you didn't want the GetQueuedCompletionStatus to return when a handle is set to the signaled state, that you can set the bottom bit of an event handle - that would suppress notifications. The very first Read More...
Posted Friday, January 21, 2005 10:09 AM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

Kitten Pictures...

Yesterday a bunch of people asked for pictures of the kittens. We don't have any current ones, but these are a couple I took a while ago... This is Spazz and Aphus in our master bathroom - Spazz figured out how to jump onto that ledge when he was about Read More...
Posted Friday, January 21, 2005 9:24 AM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

New "Iron Man" Microsoft Blogger

I haven't mentioned it before, but one of my must-read blogs is Michael Kaplan's. His blog ( here ) has been consistantly fascinating reading. Michael's the lead on the globalization team here in Windows, he's the wizard when it comes to internationalization Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 20, 2005 7:29 PM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments

Laptops and Kittens....

I mentioned the other day that we have four cats currently. Three of them are 18 month old kittens (ok, at 18 months, they're not kittens anymore, but we still refer to them as "the kittens"). A while ago, one of them (Aphus, we believe) discovered Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 20, 2005 10:41 AM by LarryOsterman | 34 Comments
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This is just wierd - why doesn't KOMO TV's hidef signal reliably work?

I don't have a HD setup (my AV setup is still living in dinosaur land), but I just received this piece of mail on an internal mailing list that I found just fascinating: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=254620&perpage=60&pagenumber=36 Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 19, 2005 11:35 AM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments

419 scams 'R' us..

I'm a bit fragged today (up too late working on a school project with Daniel) so instead of something technical, I thought I'd share an email I just received... FROM: Sgt. Mark Ed Important Message To President / Managing Director.. Good day, My name Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 18, 2005 10:17 AM by LarryOsterman | 20 Comments
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18 years ago, Today.

Editors Note: You knew this was coming Dear :) Eighteen years ago today, on January 17th, 1987, at the Scarsdale Synagogue - Tremont Temple , Valorie Lynne Holden and Lawrence William Osterman were married. I still have a laminated copy of our wedding Read More...
Posted Monday, January 17, 2005 1:43 PM by LarryOsterman | 22 Comments
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Threat Modeling, Part 2 - threats

The first threat modeling post discussed the first part of threat modeling, which is defining your assets and understanding how the data flows through the design of your component. Today, I want to talk about the threats themselves. One of the key aspects Read More...
Posted Monday, January 17, 2005 11:51 AM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments
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Wholey Google Juice, Batman!

I've noticed a small, but ongoing stream of comments coming into my " Bobs Math Answers " post from the start of this year. That post answered the math homework problem posed in my "just before the break" post here . Most of those questions were things Read More...
Posted Friday, January 14, 2005 12:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments
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Threat Modeling, part 1

One of the requirements for designing software at Microsoft these days is that every (and I do mean EVERY) feature in every product needs to have a threat model. Threat modeling isn't new, it's been a part of good design for years. Heck, the IETF has Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 13, 2005 11:16 AM by LarryOsterman | 15 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

Anatomy of a software bug, part 1 - the NT browser

No, I don't mean that the NT browser's a software bug... Actually Raymond's post this morning about the network neighborhood got me thinking about the NT browser and it's design. I've written about the NT browser before here , but never wrote up how the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 11, 2005 11:18 AM by LarryOsterman | 20 Comments
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What's wrong with this code, part 8 - the answers.

Yesterday's post was a snippet of code that was supposed to validate an email address provided by the caller. As such, it wasn't actually that bad, and for most email addresses, it does the right thing. This example is actually better than many email Read More...
Posted Monday, January 10, 2005 12:15 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 8 - Email Address Validation

It's time for another "What's wrong with this code". Today's example is really simple, and hopefully easy. It's a snippet of code I picked up from the net that's intended to validate an email address (useful for helping to avoid SQL injection attacks, Read More...
Posted Friday, January 07, 2005 9:07 AM by LarryOsterman | 23 Comments

Microsoft Anti-Spyware

I don't normally do "Me Too" posts, and I know that this one will get a lot of coverage on the Microsoft blogs, but the Seattle PI blog just mentioned that the beta of Microsoft's new anti-spyware solution was just released to the web here . I installed Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 06, 2005 10:12 AM by LarryOsterman | 21 Comments
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What IS a security vulnerability, anyway?

There was an internal discussion, and someone pointed to this article written by Scott Culp that describes what a "Security Vulnerability" is. It's actually a cool article, and rather nicely points out the definition of a vulnerability: A security vulnerability Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 06, 2005 9:57 AM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments
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Why does Win32 even have Fibers?

Raymond 's had an interesting series on fibers (starting here ), and I thought I'd expand on them a bit. Fibers were added to Windows (in NT 3.51 SP3, IIRC) because some customers (not just SQL server) believed that they could improve the performance Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 05, 2005 3:58 PM by LarryOsterman | 21 Comments
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What's the big deal with the Moore's law post?

In yesterday's article , Jeff made the following comment : I don't quite get the argument. If my applications can't run on current hardware, I'm dead in the water. I can't wait for the next CPU. The thing is that that's the way people have worked for Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:45 PM by LarryOsterman | 18 Comments

Phuket

I wasn't planning on writing about the disaster, since I figured that many people more eloquent than I had already covered it. And then I got an email from Will Poole, the Senior VP in charge of the Windows division. Will was on Phuket at the time of Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 04, 2005 10:34 AM by LarryOsterman | 18 Comments
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Moore's Law Is Dead, Long Live Moore's law

Herb Sutter has an insightful article that will be published in Dr. Dobb's in March, but he's been given permission to post it to the web ahead of time. IMHO, it's an absolute must-read. In it, he points out that developers will no longer be able to count Read More...
Posted Monday, January 03, 2005 11:17 AM by LarryOsterman | 41 Comments

Bobs Math Question: The Official Answers

EDIT: Please note: This is a single post explaining the answer to a question posted earlier on this blog. This site is NOT intended as a general purpose site in which to get help with your math homework. If you're having problems with your math homework, Read More...
Posted Monday, January 03, 2005 9:03 AM by LarryOsterman | 19 Comments
 
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