A couple of weeks ago MSN Messenger started to crash on start-up on my Windows 7 x64 box. The message indicated an invalid memory access violation in WLDcore.dll. After a bit of searching on the Internet, I found a couple of pages that pointed to this registry value being the problem (the number at the end will be your passport ID):

Last week I came across a very strange problem with Windows printing - an attempt to create a printer device context through CreateDC within a 32-bit IIS worker process would fail and return NULL, but GetLastError would indicate that there was no error and there was nothing in the system or application event log to help me identify the problem.

Naturally, my first thought was that the IIS anonymous user is missing some access rights and I spent some time double-checking various permissions and privileges, but found nothing that would be relevant in this case. Suspecting that the problem lies elsewhere, I added the anonymous user to the Administrators group, which actually made things worse. Now not only CreateDC would still return NULL, but it would actually take about a minute for this call to fail!

I remember the times when ISP support personnel knew the mechanics of mail transfer. It seems, however, that these times are gone forever - every time I call Bell Sympatico Support, I have to spend more and more time explaining what went wrong and most of the time end up working around problems on my end.

About a couple of weeks ago I started having problems with mail messages sent in non-Latin encodings - all non-Latin characters would be replaced with question marks. At first, I suspected Outlook Express, which hasn't been updated for a while and now is discontinued by Microsoft, but trying different mail clients indicated that the problem was with the Bell's POP3 server.

I was wading through the code of one of the administrative scripts (adsutil.vbs) that comes with Microsoft's Internet Information Service (IIS) and came across the code shown below. The utility can be found in the c:\Inetpub\AdminScripts\ directory.

Internet Explorer v7 is probably the worst software title ever released by Microsoft, sporting poorly designed UI, various web standards followed inconsistently, lack of innovation and absence of any built-in developers tools. In hope that Microsoft learned from their IE7 mistakes, I downloaded IE8 beta and gave it a try. Let's have a look.

Back in the days of Windows 3.11, Microsoft provided a special layer that made it possible for 16-bit and 32-bit code to interact with each other.The technique used for such interface is called thunking, which allowed both sides to be blissfully unaware that they are not quite compatible.

Mac vs. PC is probably the only commercial that made me hit the Play button while fast-forwarding through commercials, always wondering what other Vista feature Apple will pick on.

Here they are, ever cool Mac and ever busy PC, always trying to prove something, coming up with new ideas, troubleshooting the silly OS it was forced to run by evil OEM distributors, discussing ways to find solutions with his colleagues and friends.

HTTP standard (RFC 2616) defines that when a web browser requests something from a website, it should accompany requests with a string, called User-Agent, describing browser components. Each component is expected to have a name, a version and optional comments. The purpose of the user agent string is to allow websites tailor responses for particular browser versions and for statistical analysis of web traffic.

So, most browser publishers came up with user agent strings that identify the browser type, its major components, operating system and user's language.

I always liked Intel's hardware design and documentation. I learned a lot reading 8086, 80286 and 80386 manuals back when they were new and shiny packages of raw power. Even some of the failed Intel's technologies, such as iAPX 432, were a great inspiration for me those days.

Application performance was always a very important topic for me, so I was always interested in software profilers. Microsoft ships a command line profiler with Visual Studio, but it's a very awkward tool and it doesn't work well in multi-threaded environment. I used a few other titles, such as DEC's HiProf or NuMega's TrueTime, but application profilers always suffered from lack of interest from the development crowd and most of them didn't do well.

Naturally, when I got my hands on the Intel's performance analyzer (VTune) in the summer of 2007, I was looking forward to work with another example of Intel's great work.