George V. Reilly's Technical Blog

I've been programming in C since 1985 and C++ since 1991, but I've never found a use for octal representation until now, aside from the permissions argument for chmod. I've done a lot of bit twiddling: hex has been indispensable and I've often wished for a built-in notation for binary constants (WinDbg uses 0y to denote binary literals and 0n to denote decimal literals (when the radix is not ten)). Octal, however, has always seemed as vestigial as a human appendix.

I just came across www.liveaiddvd.net, the newly released DVD of the famous Live Aid concert. In 1985, there was a huge famine in Africa. Millions were dying. Bob Geldof, the leader of the Irish punk band, the Boomtown Rats, somehow managed to put together a huge multi-artist concert that took place simultaneously in London and in Philadelphia. A billion and a half people watched it live. $140 million was raised.

William Butler Yeats

I was at the Seattle Opera on Wednesday evening, to see Rigoletto. It's the tale of a hunchbacked jester who is put under a curse for tormenting an old man.

I'm pulling this post for now until I get a chance to rework it, after I got some feedback about the accuracy of what I said.

Two weeks ago, I went back to Microsoft. I'm now a contractor in Windows Emerging Markets, working on a research project for an architect. What we're doing is quite interesting and I hope to be able to talk about it someday.

I couldn't browse to the default website running on an XP SP2 machine earlier today, which was odd, since it worked yesterday, and I hadn't done anything since but reboot. Event Viewer said that IIS couldn't bind instance 1. w3svc/1 was configured to run on port 80. I thought at first that it might be something to do with the new firewall in XP SP2 blocking IIS, but that seemed odd and besides I couldn't find any mention of IIS in the firewall UI.

I've presented technical talks at a few conferences. I wasn't bad, but I wasn't all that great either.