The Old New Thing

Not every first-chance exception is a security vulnerability

December 18, 2007 Dec 18, 2007 12/18/07
Raymond Chen
In the category of dubious vulnerability, I submit the following (paraphrased) report: If I call the function, I can cause a buffer overflow exception if I provide an insertion that is more than 2000 characters long. The function in Windows NT, 2000 and XP used the dynamically expanding buffer technique to allocate memory for ...

Wall Street bonus season's trickle-down

December 17, 2007 Dec 17, 2007 12/17/07
Raymond Chen
Marketplace covers the businesses who are indirect beneficiaries of the Wall Street bonus season. Ted Fisher, who sells custom-tailored clothing, sees 35 to 40% of his business come in during the three months of bonus season. I suspect business near Redmond are similarly affected by Microsoft review season, though perhaps not as much now as...

Unwittingly enveloped in the Santarchy

December 14, 2007 Dec 14, 2007 12/14/07
Raymond Chen
Last Saturday, my friends and I were heading for a subway station in Brooklyn and found ourselves behind a man and a woman both dressed in Santa Claus outfits. They were kind enough to wave us onto the train with a "hurry, hurry!", and we made it on board just as the subway doors closed. And then we discovered that we were on a subway train ...

The compatibility constraints of your side effects: Beeping

December 14, 2007 Dec 14, 2007 12/14/07
Raymond Chen
Why does the Welcome screen beep if you hit the space bar after the computer has finished starting up? For compatibility with a side effect of the Windows XP Welcome screen. A beta tester asked us why we removed the beeps that were generated if you started typing at the Welcome screen after the computer finished starting up. Well, we ...

Throwing a cup of hot water into the air in sub-zero temperatures

December 13, 2007 Dec 13, 2007 12/13/07
Raymond Chen
One of my colleagues on a previous team was stationed in Alaska as part of his military service. He said that one of the things people did for a cheap thrill was to take a cup of hot water outside when it was like a bazillion degrees below zero and throw it up into the air. (Things must be really boring in Alaska in the dead of winter.) But ...

AppInit_DLLs should be renamed Deadlock_Or_Crash_Randomly_DLLs

December 13, 2007 Dec 13, 2007 12/13/07
Raymond Chen
I have no idea why the window manager team added this feature to Windows NT. It basically says, "Hi, use this key to violate all the rules known to mankind about what can legitimately be done in a function. Oh, and be an attractive malware attack vector, too." I've debugged a few crashes that were traced back to the key. What makes ...

Christmas lights in the Dyker Heights neighborhood

December 12, 2007 Dec 12, 2007 12/12/07
Raymond Chen
If you come to New York City in December, you'll find the festive Christmas season throughout the town. Skaters wobble beneath the giant tree in Rockefeller Center. Giant snowflakes adorn the upper floors of the Saks Fifth Avenue store while animated Christmas-themed window displays entertain visitors on the ground floor of Saks, as well as ...

When selecting system colors, match but don't mix

December 12, 2007 Dec 12, 2007 12/12/07
Raymond Chen
Here's a question that came in from a customer: Is there a way to view all the Windows color schemes at once? We want to display text in the color against a background of , and we want to check that this looks good in all of the themes. A mistake I see from some programs is mixing system colors that are not meant to be mixed. The colors I'...

Exploiting the inattentive, episode 3: Confusing movie titles

December 11, 2007 Dec 11, 2007 12/11/07
Raymond Chen
In early 1997, the movie Fly Away Home, a film about a teenage girl and her father rescuing a family of geese (inspired by Operation Migration), was released on DVD. the movie was well-reviewed and even earned an Academy Award nomination. The very same weekend, the movie with the very similar name Follow Me Home was released in theaters. ...