Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Eric Lippert's Erstwhile Blog
Desafinado, Part Three: Too Many Fifths
Last time we established the diatonic scale which has the nice property that there are five tone...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 04/13/2005
VBScript Quiz Answers, Parts Eleven and Twelve
- X andY are both Booleans. Which of the following always assignsTrue? Why? (a) Z = Not X Or Y = X...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 04/05/2005
A Face Made For Email, Part Two
One year ago this week I was the Channel Nine guinea pig -- I'm still not sure why, but for some...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 04/01/2005
VBScript Quiz Answers, Part Eight
- Which of these programs is syntactically legal? (a) Class Bar Function Foo End Function Function...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 03/23/2005
VBScript Quiz Answers, Part Six
This question was designed to highlight some of the oddities in VBScript's rules for what makes a...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 03/16/2005
VBScript Quiz Answers, Part Five
- Which of the following statements are guaranteed to never print False? Assume that On Error...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 03/09/2005
VBScript Quiz Answers, Part Four, Plus, More Trivia!
Last night I gave away more copies of my book at our Visual Studio Tools for Office developer lab,...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 03/03/2005
VBScript Quiz Answers, Part Three, and RegEx Memory Leak
Co-Winner Nicholas Allen's prize is en route to his home now. Steven Bone, I need your mailing...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 03/01/2005
VBScript Quiz Answers, Part Two
When you're getting close to shipping a beta for a big product, the dev team is either insanely busy...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 02/25/2005
VBScript Quiz Answers, Part One
There were a grand total of eight entries to my VBScript quiz -- I think I made it too hard!...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 02/18/2005
Why does WScript.ConnectObject not always work?
I've had a tiny handful of entries in my VBScript quiz. I know from my logs that 2600+ people have...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 02/15/2005
Win Fabulous Prizes!
I want to do a long -- potentially very long -- series of blog articles about the fundamental...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 02/10/2005
You Want Salt With That? Part Four: Challenge-Response
My friend Kristen asked me over the weekend when I was going to stop blogging about crypto math and...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 02/07/2005
You Want Salt With That? Part Three: Salt The Hash
Last time we were considering what happens if an attacker gets access to your server's password...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 02/03/2005
You Want Salt With That? Part Two: We Need A Hash
OK, we want to sketch out an authentication system which is sufficiently secure against common...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 01/31/2005
You Want Salt With That? Part One: Security vs Obscurity
A poster to one of the Joel On Software fora the other day asked what a "salt" was (in the...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 01/28/2005
Fun With Floating Point Arithmetic, Part Six
One more thing -- I said earlier that the VBScript float-to-string algorithm was a little bit...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 01/26/2005
That's a Big Transistor
Here's some fun for a Friday. A few years back a bunch of my coworkers and I got to discussing the...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 01/21/2005
Fun with Floating Point Arithmetic, Part Four
A reader also asked the other day why it is that in VBScript, CSng(0.1) = CDbl(0.1) is False. Forget...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 01/18/2005
Fun With Floating Point Arithmetic, Part Three
I've been getting lots of mail, questions and pointers to interesting articles on some of the trials...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 01/17/2005
Straight from the source
One of the truly great things about working here is that Distinguished Engineers take time out of...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 01/14/2005
Floating Point And Benford's Law, Part Two
A number of readers asked for an explanation of my offhand comment that Benford's Law can be used to...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 01/13/2005
Benford's Law
While I was poking through my old numeric analysis textbooks to refresh my memory for this series on...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 01/12/2005
Still Scratching The Surface
I was pleased to learn earlier today that Scott Wiltamuth, one of the designers of C#, has started...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 01/11/2005
Floating Point Arithmetic, Part One
A month ago I was discussing some of the issues in integer arithmetic, and I said that issues in...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 01/10/2005
T4: VBScript and the Terminator
I had some free time on the flight to Canada and my laptop with me, so maybe I will do a little...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 12/22/2004
Whidbey Island And Bagel Mathematics
I was highly amused to read on Raymond Chen's blog the other day that mathematicians are hard at...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 12/15/2004
Ologiology
No technology today -- but, hey, where does that word "technology" come from, anyway? I'm on this...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 12/08/2004
VBScript Constants Are Not Hoisted
A reader asked me the other day to riff a bit on why this works: Dim iFor i = 1 To 2 print...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 12/07/2004
Why do built-in JScript functions not appear in the typeinfo?
A reader sent me an email over the weekend asking about some odd behaviour in the guts of the...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 12/06/2004
Integer Arithmetic in VBScript, Part Two
Here's another recent question I've received on bit twiddling in VBScript: You discussed the issues...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 12/03/2004
Bouncing Zero Bugs, Together
Sorry for not blogging much lately, but good heavens, I've been busy. I'm working on a new book, I...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 11/15/2004
Democracy in Action
I saw Tom Stoppard's play "Jumpers" recently. The line that got the biggest audience response: "It's...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 11/03/2004
The National Coin Flipping League Championship Series
No tech today, but a little basic math. In baseball, a sport I know little about, apparently the...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 10/21/2004
Google Desktop On The Cheap Part One: Nope, That Doesn't Work
So, how many files are we talking about here? I've got over thirty thousand source code files...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 10/20/2004
Google Desktop On The Cheap, Part Zero
Before I get started with my next series, two quick notes. First, at long last I had dinner with...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 10/18/2004
Wherefore IDispatchEx?
Quite a while back I said that I'd write a post describing why we invented IDispatchEx. I already...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 10/07/2004
Anthimeria weirds languages
A little non-technical rant for a Friday. Professor Thingo, in a recent blog entry, decries the use...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 10/01/2004
Breadth is sometimes better than depth
A while back the Scripting Guys blogged about using recursion to list all the files in a directory...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 09/27/2004
Use vs. Mention in JScript Doesn't Come For Free
Before today's entry, a quick note. Work has just gotten insanely busy as we push towards getting...
Author: Eric Lippert Date: 09/20/2004