Windrider's New Writeups

November 30, 2008 (personal)

2008-11-30T23:58:40Z

This is the writeup formerly known as...

Everything2 reminded me how cool my life is

My life is a pretty cool thing to live through. Don't feel left out; yours probably is, too. It's really easy to forget that, though, because you're too busy living to really pay attention to it. You fall into a routine, just doing things as they happen, and even the weird things lose their lustre; nothing really breaks your tempo.

But your life is probably cool. I'd forgotten that mine is, but I've just been reminded of it.

Over the past month, I've been participating in Iron Noder. I'm not actually reaching the goal, making my attempt a glorious failure. The glory, of course, is that I'm writing again. "Getting back into everything2" had been on my to-do list for over two years, a hiatus longer than the active time of my account. It never got done out of pure laziness; I had a queue of…

WinDbg (thing)

2008-11-30T23:58:35Z

WinDbg is the GUI version of the Debugging Tools for Windows, the free (as in beer) debugger package released by Microsoft to facilitate the composition of software on Microsoft Windows. It has been continually refined since Windows NT and has, despite its primitive interface, accumulated an incredibly powerful mess of features.

WinDbg is ugly compared to the debugger in visual Studio, but it is also significantly more powerful. Its !analyze extension automatically diagnoses the causes of the sweeping majority of program or operating system crashes, down to the exact line at which memory corruption or pointer mishandling occurs. For more complex tasks, a single command can dump entire Standard Template Library data structures, or extract data from custom classes and, if they are shaped vaguely like a linked list, automatically follow pointers to give structure information.

WinDbg has been designed…

Tarot Spreads (thing)

2008-11-30T23:50:40Z

The Branch spread

Invented by me

Most Tarot layouts are designed not to tell the future, but to give information on the present. The general excuse for this is that the future is an inexact, fluid thing, and making excessively clear predictions on it is likely to interfere with it in and of itself; a deck of cards can't generally account for choice. Even in the Celtic Cross, the cards representing the Future only apply if things continue to go about the way they're going now.

This is true, of course, but it is also overly simplistic. The future is a fluid, flexible thing, but it is still valid to reason about and perform divination against. This was much of the original intent of divination, after all. Knowing about now is all well and good, but knowing about later is a lot more fun.

The future is shaped by our choices. So why not invent a spread that reflects those choices?

Dealing

…

Breakage (thing)

2008-11-30T23:21:36Z

Breakage can refer to the profit a company takes in for services paid for but never received. A significant number of companies have breakage integrated into their business models to some degree; some companies rely on breakage as their entire basis of profit.

The most obvious form of breakage is from gift certificates or gift cards. In states where this has not been outlawed, most modern gift cards start charging an inactivity fee after a period of time vaguely disclosed in very fine print on the bottom of the back of the card. This inactivity fee is extremely silly. Your gift card exists as one row of a database. Neither the card nor the card number is going to be recycled. That oustanding gift card is costing the company nothing other than a trivial liability on their books. As well it should, for they owe you a debt: their service has been paid for,…

emusic (thing)

2008-11-30T22:50:41Z

eMusic is a music subscription service with a business model fundamentally different from Rhapsody, Zune Pass, or the now-defunct Yahoo! Music Unlimited. While the latter subscriptions allow unlimited access to a DRM-laden library of major label songs, eMusic offers a restricted number of downloads per month, which are in plain MP3 format and can be kept even after the expiration or termination of the subscription. eMusic deals exclusively with labels for independent artists, partially as a matter of brand identity, and partially as the group willing to accept eMusic's relatively low prices.

While eMusic's former business model offered subscribers unlimited downloads, this caused a great deal of trouble in practice. People would subscribe, download everything they possibly could (sometimes with the help of automated tools), then cancel the subscription, re-subscribing to download all…

Just-In-Time Debugger (thing)

2008-11-30T22:06:05Z

A just-in-time debugger is a program registered with a user's operating system of choice such that it will intervene at the moment a program crashes and allow a programmer (or simply an expert) to examine the state of the crashing program and determine exactly why it died violently.

When a program crashes, the operating system is, in effect, forcing it to exit abnormally. Since the operating system is taking over and interrupting the usual control flow, it is very aware of the crash, and can take the opportunity to run another program as a result. A debugger is ideal here, as it allows for examination of the memory of the dying software, including its call stack, and the programmer can often immediately determine the bug that resulted in the software's untimely demise.

Microsoft Windows from XP onward comes with a built-in just-in-time debugger. Also known as Watson32 (or Watson64, for the 64-bit edition),…