I’ve been meaning to post this for days but I keep forgetting. Alex Ionescu, who is another one of those guys that just seems to know way more than one person should be allowed to know about Windows internals, has started blogging (again).
He’s got a good user-mode debugging series posted, and if I know Alex, there’s plenty more good stuff still to come.
Welcome to the blogosphere, Alex.
The march of progress continues, and I keep pheeling safer and safer!
It turns out that something about my recent CSQ rules post triggered IE7’s automatic phishing philter. I know of no good reason that it would pick up that post (and only that post!) other than a couple of words in the title of the article it links to (about CONTAINING_RECORD), which I’m not going to repeat here phor phear of being philtered.
Anyway, apologies if you got a nasty warning phrom my site this weekend.
I’ve changed my comment policy to no longer require registration or moderation. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time now.
BTW, this is only even possible because of the amazingly good service provided by Akismet. Comment spam was the original reason I enacted that policy, and Akismet has kept me spam-free for months now. Highly recommended.
It looks like there’s a new driver-related blog in the world. Peter has a pointer to new UMDF team member Ilias Tsigkogiannis’s newly started blog. Looks like it’s going to cover somewhat more introductory topics, at least at first.
Welcome to the blogosphere, Ilias!
UPDATE: Wow, sorry about the typo… it’s a blog
, not a bog
.
The Surfin’ Safari blog has a post by maciej pointing out that most people use XHTML wrong, including (in particular) almost everyone that displays the “Valid XHTML 1.0″ logo on their websites.
So what really determines if a document is HTML or XHTML? The one and only thing that controls whether a document is HTML or XHTML is the MIME type. If the document is served with a text/html MIME type, it is treated as HTML. If it is served as application/xhtml+xml or text/xml, it gets treated as XHTML. In particular, none of the following things will cause your document to be treated as XHTML:
- Using an XHTML doctype declaration
- Putting an XML declaration at the top
- Using XHTML-specific syntax like self-closing tags
- Validating it as XHTML
In fact, the vast majority of supposedly XHTML documents on the internet are served as text/html. Which means they are not XHTML at all, but actually invalid HTML that’s getting by on the error handling of HTML parsers.
The article concludes by recommending, essentially, that you write HTML 4.01 code and serve it up as text/html. Controversial advice, given what the Web Standards crowd has been saying about XHTML for a while. In light of the above, XHTML seems worse than useless (for the next decade anyway) – it’s actually causing the very compatibility problems that the WaSP people are trying to prevent. I’m curious to know what people like Molly Holzschlag have to say about this.
The article is worth a read. Don’t give up on it because of it’s very introductory-level first paragraph.
It had to happen eventually! My company, Positive Networks, finally has a blog. For those that don’t know, Positive Networks provides one of the coolest remote access services in the industry. We’re going to be blogging mostly about VPN-related stuff and Positive corporate happenings. Stop by and say hello.
Nobody is a good critic of his or her own work, but I thought I had at least a reasonable idea of what people like to read on this site. However, according to the site traffic data, the post about the Christmas presents seems to be one of the most popular ever. Several people (including a couple of commenters) have asked me about the Private Dancer shirt. (And no, I don’t know where to get one; sorry!)
Maaaaan… it’s been way too long since I’ve posted. I’ve been absolutely buried at work, doing 80 hour weeks trying to revamp the way a network component works. I’ve had my head deep into I/O Completion for days, and it’s been fun, but I haven’t had time to do much of anything else in my life.
So, back to regularly scheduled programming soon, hopefully.
I’m currently undergoing the long but not terribly painful process of getting a new Windows 2000 VM patched up for some specific testing, and while I watch a bunch of status bars, I thought I’d toss out a few random things I’ve been collecting, of varying interest to varying people.
First off, the Microsoft MacBU people have had a couple of amazingly good posts this week about some of what makes running software teams so hard. Schweib has an amazing post about MacBU’s decision to drop support for VB in the next release of MacOffice. He gets into some architectural details of the VB implementation and of the necessary changes to support Intel, Xcode, and 64-bit.
The technical stuff is fascinating – on-the-fly C++ object morphing, runtime-generated assembly, etc. – lots of interesting[1] stuff. But more than that, the detailed discussion of the tradeoffs is great. You might have to be a developer or dev manager to really grok what he’s saying, but man, I know *I* have been in that situation before, and it’s painful.
And finally, a plug for corporate bloggers – Schweib’s post is, in my opinion, the very best PR Microsoft could dream of in selling this (painful) issue to its customers. No amount of money can buy the level of trust that’s built by knowing that there are real humans sitting over there wrestling with hard problems like this just as conscientiously as I would.
Another MacBU developer, David Weiss, has a post up about the tradeoffs involved in automating software testing. If you do software test for a living (or manage someone who does), you’ll like this. It’s interesting to remember that the very same problems that apply to small dev shops (like mine) apply to one of the biggest (and certainly richest) shops in the world. Resources simply can’t fix some problems. Then again, we’re all computer scientists here, so we knew that already. 
To complete the trifecta, I just downloaded the newest build of Parallels Desktop, which is a VPC and VMware competitor for MacIntels. Maaaan, it’s fast. We’re talking 7 seconds from the end of the BIOS screen (which is pretty short itself) to the windows XP login prompt. And this is on my fully patched XPSP2 dev VM, with a dozen DDKs, half a dozen SDKs, various Visual Studios, a couple of WinDBGs, and all of the other crap it takes to write code. Plus, my USB smartcard reader now works, which was my biggest remaining beef. I do tons of driver development of software-only drivers in it. Recommended!
Status bars are still crawling across the screen. Oh well, at least they’re fast. 
[1] if you happen to be a big old geek
Mark Lacey, a developer who works on the compilers and related tools, has a great blog post up with a definitive explanation of the Interlocked* code generation issue that I mentioned before. He left a comment linking to his post, but I thought I’d link it from the main page since I did complain about this issue on the main page.
I’ll let you read Mark’s detailed explanation of the bug in question, but at a high level, he says that the following functions are affected:
He also suggests a couple of workarounds for code that needs to check return values from these functions.
Note that although he refers to the visual studio compilers, the issue is present in the currently released DDK compilers (13.10) from the 3790 series. It does seem to be resolved by the WDK’s 14.00 compiler (although the WDK is still in beta, of course).
I continue to be impressed with how responsive Microsoft’s bloggers are to the communities they support. I had really only expected a don’t do this
KB article in a few months. Getting an authoritative developer response like this is fantastic. And, from the look of the first dozen or so posts, it looks like Mark’s blog is going to be great. Added to the blogroll!