-
Recent Posts
Categories
- AltDevBlogADay
- Bugs
- Chromium
- Code analysis
- Code Reliability
- Commuting
- Computers and Internet
- Debugging
- Documentation
- Drinks
- Environment
- Floating Point
- Fractals
- Fun
- Gaming
- Investigative Reporting
- Linux
- Math
- memory
- Performance
- Programming
- Quadratic
- Rants
- Security
- Symbols
- Travel
- uiforetw
- Uncategorized
- Unicycling
- Visual Studio
- WLPG
- Xbox 360
- xperf
Follow me on Twitter
My TweetsMeta
Category Archives: Rants
No Start Menu for You
I tend to launch most programs on my Windows 10 laptop by typing the <Win> key, then a few letters of the program name, and then hitting enter. On my powerful laptop (SSD and 32 GB of RAM) this process … Continue reading
Posted in Code Reliability, Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Rants, uiforetw, xperf
Tagged hangs, pageheap, Windows 10 abandonware
25 Comments
Arranging Invisible Icons in Quadratic Time
Near the end of January I was pointed to a twitter thread where a Windows user with a powerful machine was hitting random hangs in explorer. Lots of unscientific theories were being proposed. I don’t generally do random analysis of … Continue reading
Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Quadratic, Rants, Symbols
Tagged dawson's first law of computing, Quadratic
18 Comments
Windows Timer Resolution: The Great Rule Change
The behavior of the Windows scheduler changed significantly in Windows 10 2004 (aka, the April 2020 version of Windows), in a way that will break a few applications, and there appears to have been no announcement, and the documentation has … Continue reading
Posted in Environment, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Rants
Tagged time resolution, timebeginperiod
77 Comments
O(n^2), again, now in WMI
I recently hit some multi-minute delays on my workstation. After investigating I found that the problem was due to a lock being held for five minutes, and during that time the lock-holder was mostly just spinning in a nine-instruction loop. … Continue reading
Posted in Investigative Reporting, Programming, Quadratic, Rants, uiforetw, xperf
Tagged complexity, ETW, O(n^2), performance, WMI
23 Comments
Zombie Processes are Eating your Memory
Zombies probably won’t consume 32 GB of your memory like they did to me, but zombie processes do exist, and I can help you find them and make sure that developers fix them. Tool source link is at the bottom. … Continue reading
Posted in Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Rants
Tagged handles, leaks, zombies
74 Comments
What We Talk About When We Talk About Performance
TL;DR – the phrase “90% faster” is interpreted by people in two different ways: 90% less time The speed (ops/sec or km/h) is 90% greater I strongly prefer #2 but due to the ambiguity this phrase should never be used. … Continue reading
The Spoils of Law (Moore’s Law)–a New Laptop
I just got a new laptop (Lenovo P51, four-cores, eight-threads, 32 GB RAM, multiple drive bays). My old machine was more than six years old so it was probably overdue. I wanted to record some of the reasons for the … Continue reading
A modest proposal for a more natural KB
I recently wrote a blog post saying that I thought Windows Explorer should use the more natural base-10 meanings of the kB/MB/GB/TB prefixes, instead of the base-2 meanings that are a few percent larger. I convinced nobody. I was told, … Continue reading
Base Ten For (Almost) Everything
It’s 2016 and Windows still displays drive and file sizes using base-2 size prefixes. My 1 TB SSD is shown as 916 GB, and a 449 million byte video file is shown as 428 MB. That is, Windows still insists … Continue reading
Home Network Printer Setup That Works
Whenever I add a network printer to one of my Windows computers at home I end up with a reference to a hard-coded IP address. That means that the next time my home router reboots and assigns a different IP … Continue reading
Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson 