I’m not singling anyone out here, but…
PLEASE… quit sending me a Netscape icon when I visit your site with Safari. Or Firefox for that matter. I haven’t used Netscape in years, and neither has anyone else. I don’t care if my mom gets it wrong, but you are (ostensibly) a Professional Web Programmer.
Thanks and Merry Xmas! 
There’s a great video up on Channel9 with a few architecture guys discussing Vista kernel changes. I had no idea Daryl Havens was still working (again) at MS. It’s kind of fun listening him explain about what an IRP is, considering that he kind of invented it.
There are some interesting tidbits, including some commentary on MM scaling, glitch-free multimedia (“Windows isn’t a classic real-time OS”), device error handling, and some interesting forward-looking commentary.
Rob Short (and kernel team) – Going deep inside Windows Vista’s kernel architecture
Deep Medhi sent this site that I thought I’d pass along. Pretty funny.
Doron Holan posted this to NTDEV in response to a KMDF on Win2k question:
We’re working on the win2k deployment story as we speak. Like I posted previously, the community feedback is much appreciated in getting this issue resolved.
Everyone has basically said that no Win2k is a deal killer. It’s good to see this getting taken care of so quickly, and with a minimum of marketing mealy-mouthing.
Well, the blog came crashing down this afternoon after a totally botched upgrade to Wordpress 2.0 rc3. A friend told me that there was a new wordpress hole, so I was working too quickly and managed to blow away the db. Anyway, I’ll have the old content back up this weekend, but for now, enjoy yourself by laughing at my misery.
Wow, having a cold sucks. Plus, I just hosted the single biggest party that has ever happened at the Dispensa household, with 60 people there at once at the high water mark.
Recommended:
Not recommended:
Anyway, on to business. I got an e-mail today that the December Customer Technology Preview release of Vista is out – build 5270. If you’re in the beta, go grab it. I actually missed the last CTP, so I think I’ll download this one and see what has changed. I’ve been doing most of my testing using the WDK, and have found several bugs so far. By the way, bug reporting to the wdkfb alias is amazing – the people on the other end are responsive and things get done. It really makes you feel connected to the development process.
Tangent: one of the things that makes people enjoy messing with open-source software is the feeling of control they have, in that they can see bug databases, suggest features, test pre-release versions, etc. Microsoft’s efforts to engage the community during this round of betas has been great along these lines: I feel connected enough to the product teams to provide feedback and see works-in-progress.
Mark Russinovich has a post on his blog about bypassing group policy as an unprivileged user. It’s a really interesting read. Dana Epp also has some commentary on the issue.
This is yet more evidence of two facts:
Microsoft has been the victim of its own success for years; Raymond has been regaling us with app compatibility stories for years now. Windows XP is a security-as-a-retrofit model because Windows NT needed compatibility with Win9x apps, which were not designed with security as a requirement thanks to 9x’s Win31 and DOS heritage.
Good Lord, Scott Adams gets tons of comments on his blog. I read it through RSS, which is probably just as well, because I don’t spend all day reading comments.
He has a post up in which he wonders if intelligence is overrated. His blog is wonderful, by the way – he’s a much deeper guy than a lot of people guess. Anyway, one of the reasons that I work in the computer industry is the proximity to smart people. There tend to be lots of ‘em around, and intelligence is among the personal attributes that I value the most in others.
But there is a vast number of cases in which Scott is right: you can obviously be too smart for lots of little things. Jon Spaeth, a friend of mine and a Smart Guy in general, put it succinctly a few years ago: Sometimes when people get too smart they break. Related, the term blissful ignorance seems to imply the same thing.
But it goes way deeper than that, too: you can clearly be too smart for a wide variety of situations. It’s easy to prove. Let’s take salary as an example. If you could survey a broad cross-section of people and ask them these two questions:
…you would find empirically that there is an optimal IQ for a high salary. Picture it: you do a little bar graph with one bar for every 5-point IQ range, with the bar’s height being the average reported salary of everyone in that IQ range. One of the bars will be tallest (probably). It probably won’t be the one representing the highest IQ. I haven’t done this little bit of research myself, but then again, it wouldn’t matter; I don’t let facts slow me down. I’m too smart for that.
Incidentally, there is something wrong with this proof. If you think it’s too smart for its own good, you’d be on the right track.
Ruby On Rails went 1.0 today. Kinda makes you want to find a web app to code, doesn’t it?
The blog has been relocated to kernelmustard.com. Come visit me there!