Time for the semi-annual link clearance. And, as always, the obligatory plug for my column in TechNet Magazine: Footnotes ¹Yes, it isn't literally powered by RFID. I was spoofing marketing-speak. I apologize to those for whom this did not require explaining...
Yes, you can write a whereis program in 90 bytes but Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista both come with a version of , so you don't even need the batch file any more...
Half of a GUID is worse than none.
Last year, my good friend and colleague Sarah transfered from the Redmond offices to Microsoft UK in Reading. One of her most popular lunchtime stories is the mystery of the garbage lady, which she finally got around to posting on her blog. Some of my other favorite stories from her blog: A colleague of mine experienced the phenomenon ...
Some customers already have the answer but need to have their hand held. My customer wants to enforce a company-wide policy of disabling the "Keep the taskbar on top of other windows" feature. We have confirmed that there is no group policy setting for controlling this setting. Further research reveals the function. The customer wants to know ...
Here are the descriptions (verbatim) of two job positions open at a major video card manufacturer back in the late 1990's: Software Engineer - Drivers The way in to a "hot" company in a "hot" field. This entry level position requires some programming experience with graphics preferred. Senior Software Engineer - Applications (Demos) This ...
While signing up for online bill payment for one of the services I use, I encountered the following check box: Uncheck this box if you do not wish to receive electronic communications from XYZ. This is not simply a negative-sense checkbox; it's a double-negative-sense checkbox! What's wrong with this: Send me electronic communications from XYZ...
I was looking up some information about the Microsoft Partner Program, commonly abbreviated MSPP. I stumbled across an internal wiki called . My first reaction upon seeing the name was, "What, it's player versus player?" I got this images of the CEOs of the various partners wearing VR goggles and running around playing laser tag. No, it's the ...
It's great when you have a tool to make programming easier, but you still must understand what it does or you're just replacing one set of problems with another set of more subtle problems. For example, we discussed earlier the importance of knowing when your destructor runs. Here's another example, courtesy of my colleague Chris Ashton. This was...
Among other responsibilities, the Archives department preserves Microsoft history, be it old hardware, old software, old documentation, or ephemera. Last year, one of my colleagues was cleaning out his office because he was moving to Granada, and of the junk he was going to throw out, the Archives asked me to save the following: and my ...