I’m looking at adding SSPI security to the socket server code for a client; first stop is MDSN and the samples section. Although I can understand why the MSDN samples are generally just ‘here’s the API, this is the order you call things in, run along now’, I think it would be nice if they were better; especially since I often find pieces of pretty much untouched MSDN sample code deep within client’s applications… I guess it’s not really something for Microsoft and the MSDN team to provide though… Pity.

I’m spelunking around in some code for a client looking for a nasty bug that’s hard to reproduce. The code is less than ideal… It’s the kind of code that’s been put together by what I refer to as ‘Frankenstein programming’; lots of unrelated bits and pieces have been collected from various places and stuck together to make something that looks about right. Unfortunately we’re at the point where we need a vast amount of power to give this thing life, and I for one don’t see a thunder storm on the horizon…

I’ve been editing videos on a PC for far too long. It’s a lot easier than it used to be, but it still feels like it’s not quite ready for prime time for non professionals. At least it’s now reasonable easy to find room to store the masses of data that you need to manipulate when editing DV video, and the editing programs are better, and the special hardware is cheaper or no longer special.

Krzysztof Kowalczyk on Alan Cooper on software business… “Alan Cooper argues in this article that a way to win in the software business is not by cutting costs of production (i.e. number of programmers and their salaries) but by investing more in creating good software (i.e. hiring more programmers).” My emphasis; I don’t think that’s what Alan’s suggesting. Updated 3rd May 2023 to fix broken links Alan says: “You must invest more time and money on the research, thinking, planning, and design to make your product better suited to your customer’s needs.

Just holiday snaps…

The 2003/04 ski season has started. Well, for me at least. We spent the last week in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, in the hands of the Warren Smith Ski Academy. Great fun, hard work, highly recommended. The snow was wonderful for the time of year. Much more like winter snow than spring skiing. Sure it was a bit hard first thing and a few slopes got a little sugary by midday but all in all we couldn’t have asked for better conditions.

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Just yesterday, I had a discussion with the CTO of a current client. He’s a 20 year industry veteran and he was wondering why Microsoft hadn’t stopped in their tracks and underwent some massive code reviews to get rid of the problem for once and for all.ChristophDotNet Because it’s a very hard problem? How many lines of old code have you and the CTO personally reviewed and decided were completely bug free?

I’m editing a wedding video at present. I’m using Pinnacle Expression to write it to DVD. I have a dual xeon 2ghz machine with hyper threading enabled and it insists on using no more than 25% of my cpu… It doesn’t seem to be IO bound. I’ve tried boosting it’s priority, but nothing I do will make it use more than exactly 25% of cpu. I guess it’s trying really hard to be nice to me, I wish it wouldn’t.

I had just sold management in the company I am clienting for on the ability of W2K3 to avoid these, with the line that during the Windows Security Push, all 9,000+ Windows developers stopped and poured over essentially every line of Windows code remove these kinds of situations and make W2K3 the most secure OS. Now two of these in the last month. To say that this has stopped a massive redeployment is an understatement.