A Voice in the Dark

Every week, I get a report on how well our project is doing in the Microsoft test labs. It lists a great deal of confidential information that I cannot even describe to you.

This report is called the Test Pass Status Report.

Yes, someone at Microsoft is writing TPS reports.

No, they do not have cover sheets.

Filed under: Microsoft
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Go read this:

http://business.newsforge.com/business/06/07/19/206209.shtml?tid=138&tid=3

Very, very smart and insightful. Primarily because it doesn’t say what should be done or what ought to happen, it just says what already happens and lets you figure the rest out for yourself.

 

Filed under: Business, Philosophy, Politics
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Paul Thurott, over at WindowsSuperSite.com, has an interesting post at http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/wga.asp about Windows Genuine Advantage.

Apparently, he started a copy of Windows he had “installed to a VM a long time ago and archived on my server” and installed a lot of updates. Then, suddenly, his copy of Windows was not genuine!

How horrible! We must all blog angrily about this hideous problem in Windows Genuine Advantage.

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Filed under: Media, Microsoft, Programming, Security, Software
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A conservative asks one and only one question before he votes.

What benefits will be granted to the voters by this decision?

Without a satisfactory answer to that question, a conservative does not support any agenda.

The liberal asks a very different question.

What damage will be done to the voters by this decision?

Again, without a satisfactory answer - usually “none” or “minimal” - the liberal does not support any agenda.

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Filed under: Politics
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My wife and I were talking a few days ago, and the subject of communication came up. She observed that I’m frequently misunderstood because I actually think and care about things that don’t affect me; most people, she said, would not care one way or the other about gay rights unless they were themselves gay.

So when I talk about gay rights, it’s strange to most people, and they have to try and figure out why I care. Since I’m clearly not gay because I’m married and have children, they conclude that I must be either secretly gay or rabidly homophobic, because otherwise I wouldn’t care.

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Filed under: Gay Rights, Philosophy, Politics
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I see this all the time and it drives me nuts.

    http://www.myserver.com/myapplication/myscript.xxx?page=mypage

This is a fake path. It should LOOK like a path. And it CAN look like a path:

    http://www.myserver.com/myapplication/myscript.xxx/mypage

The key factor is an environment variable called PATH_INFO in the CGI specification.

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Filed under: Programming, Security, Software
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This is a cute one from MSDN entry on the FileSecurity class.

To persist new or changed access or audit rules to a file, use the SetAccessControl or SetAccessControl method. To retrieve access or audit rules from an existing file, use the GetAccessControl or GetAccessControl method.

Isn’t it nice to have choices? 

Once you actually start paying attention, you find that what they’re talking about is the methods available in the System.IO.File and System.IO.Fileinfo classes. Each has the same name for the same functionality, which is good, but the File class is a static set of methods that works on any file while FileInfo contains instance methods that only work on one specific file.

But it sure seems surreal when you first encounter it.

Filed under: Microsoft, Programming, Software
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With no fanfare or even a post, June the thirtieth was this blog’s one-year anniversary.

I had intended to make a post on this blog’s anniversary, but I was busy. Friday was a long and difficult day spent looking for the answer to a complicated coding question, which will form the bulk of this post because it’s much more interesting than the question of what it means when your blog turns one year old.

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Filed under: Programming, Software
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