There Is A Geek In Every One Of Us
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008Nick Tosches recounts his year-long quest to find out where the Windows wallpaper ‘Autumn’ was originally taken, and by who.
Archive for the ‘microsoft’ Category
Dual-booters, beware the XP installer.
Monday, November 5th, 2007About this time last year, I decided to switch to Linux. I lived happily ever after in (K)Ubuntu, with my original Windows still kept around (one word: games). So after upgrading my workhorse desktop at home a couple of weeks back, I had the opportunity to reinstall both OS’s in a dual-boot setup. The experience from the two setup processes was unbelievably radically different. more…
Take it easy, Microsoft, will ya?
Monday, June 11th, 2007I have many friends over at Microsoft working on various great products this company has built, so I don’t want this post to sound like average Microsoft bashing. But it is just sad to see Microsoft decided to go after Jamie Cansdale for something he did that actually benefits Microsoft by adding a critical piece to the development stack. Whether it is well within Microsoft’s rights to take these legal actions against Jamie Cansdale, or whether the EULA in question is overly vague, is simply beside the point. The point here is Microsoft, or at least its bureaucratic corporate arm, has once again shown its almost complete disregard of the goodwill of the development community - even its own development community. I know “prosecutorial discretion” as a legal term doesn’t really apply here, but still, perhaps Microsoft could use some of that here, too?
It is when reading news like this that I feel very grateful for being part of the Java community, where openness is the spirit, and where I don’t have to lose sleep over worrying being hauled into a court by an army of corporate lawyers.
X-JSON header useful in AJAX dialog submission flow
Tuesday, July 11th, 2006One AJAX page I’ve been playing with has this UI flow that emulates a desktop form dialog - the user clicks on a link, a modal dialog shows up with a usual form, which the user fills out and submits to the server. Now, a successful response from the server can be one of these: if there are any form validation errors, the response is the same form annotated with the error message(s), in this case the response should be used to refresh the dialog. If there are no errors, the dialog is closed, and the response from the server should contain some content to update the area above the original link the user clicked on. more…
SHIFT does not affect %*
Saturday, April 22nd, 2006In a Windows batch file, SHIFT moves all (or part of if you give an optional parameter) the command line prameters to the left for one. So, after a SHIFT command, %0 has %1 used to have, %1 has %2 used to have, and so on. But the %* variable, which holds the entire set of parameters, is not affected at all. So if you have foo.cmd calling bar.cmd, and in foo.cmd, after it has processed the first several parameters, and shifted them off the parameter list, in order to pass the rest of the parameters to bar.cmd, foo.cmd must enumerate %1 to %9 on the line calling bar.cmd, rather than simply using %*, which would pass the entire line of original parameters to bar.cmd.
HTTP Error Code 405 from VS Web Service Proxy
Monday, October 24th, 2005I have a Tomcat hosting Axis running at http://localhost:8080, and the regular VS 2002/IIS stuff running at http://localhost. So I feed the wsdl URL from Axis in VS’ “Add Web Reference”, and make VS generate the proxy for the Web service running in Axis. Unfortunately when the proxy is generated, the default service endpoint URL is always set to http://localhost. So naturally when I run the Web service consumer application in VS, it tries to go to the local IIS for the service, only to get back a 405 error. What makes this a bit hard to catch is one usually would expect a 404 error from a non-existent service endpoint.
RedirectView Fails In IE
Saturday, May 21st, 2005This isn’t really a Spring issue, but the symptom was reported on the Spring Forum. It’s good to know that IE has this limitation of 2083 characters for query strings.
the Microsoft source leak
Friday, February 20th, 2004Somebody wrote some interesting code reading notes on some of the Windows source code leaked onto the Internet. I have a few friends working for Microsoft as programmers, and they sure are like some people who would write code and comments like that. 
Schedule program to run at boot time
Monday, November 17th, 2003Add the full command line to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\BootExecute
The winshow adware
Tuesday, November 11th, 2003One of my XP machines was affected by winshow/winlink on Sunday. The symptom was that usually when a second IE window almost finished loading a page, an application error would get thrown from a winshow.dll.
Googling with “winshow” returned a surprising number of results. The one I followed to fix my system was from Symantec.
It didn’t end there. It turned out one unique feature my winshow “showed”, while not mentioned by any of the pages I have seen, was that after deleting all the related registries and files, and rebooting the system, winshow and winlink would come back!
A quick glance at the Startup folder revealed a mysterious “MSUpdater.exe” (those perverts didn’t even bother to give it a proper icon!). After removing that file and rebooting, everything came back to normal.
I think I’ll be purchasing a copy of Norton AntiVirus very shortly.
