Computers – Page 23 – Chris F Carroll

Don’t do iisreset do …

a mini batch file in your start menu, when you're debugging the application startup of a .Net application, and keep wanting to restart it:

taskkill /im aspnet_wp.exe /f
if not errorlevel == 0 pause

taskkill /im w3wp.exe /f
if not errorlevel == 0 pause

which does the job much faster.

Assuming, of course, that your reason for wanting to do an iis reset was to force a .Net application restart. And you don't mind forcing all running .Net applications to restart. And you're not on a busy production machine at rushhour.

Sysinternals’ Autoruns for Windows (What’s this process / program?)

Sysinternals has been taken over by Microsoft which gives a nice reassuring hue to all their nifty tools. Autoruns for Windows is the one you want to find out about processes which start up from the registry or other automatic means.

A command line C# shell

I am so impressed by CsharpRepl - Mono. It's brilliant. A command line interactive C# compiler.

See, mono is way better than visual studio 😉

Highly Unlikely — The Mark of the Beast Bug

In 1991, amongst a series of theorems about rounding in floating point arithmetic calculations, the author parenthetically noted that rounding a number to 53 significant digits, and then rounding it again to 52 significant digits, might produce a different answer compared to when you do the rounding to 52 digits all in one go. He all but apologised for the parenthesis, noting it was "highly unlikely to affect any practical program adversely."

19 years and 10 months later a researcher discovered that the "Mark of the Beast Bug" could freeze almost any computer in the world, and that millions of webservers could be taken down by it almost at the touch of a button — because of an error when rounding a very very small number, first to 53 significant digits, and then to 52.