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Have you noticed it says “(and some magic)” in the subtitle up above? Well, here’s some of that weirdness. A while ago I reasoned it would be interesting to make some artefacts (“amulets” or “talismans”, if you will) out of old computer processors. It’s a fairly widespread belief that crystals are useful for magical practices […]

Handles can represent files, ports, mutexes and other objects. By using the undocumented Native API function NTQuerySystemInformation() you can list all open handles from all processes. Here’s a small program that does that. This is basically a ported version of “HandleList” application by someone known as Napalm on sysinternals.com forums. I added and removed some […]

Driver development has always been the privilege of C/C++ and Assembler programmers. If someone needs to write a device driver in Delphi, he has to settle for “adapter” drivers that would allow their user-mode program some ability to interface with kernel-mode functions. There are also “wizards” that (supposedly) allow one to create a driver without […]

To avoid any confusion, let me say that this article will talk about the taskbar buttons that represent the visible windows of currently running applications. I will not discuss the system tray or Quick Launch. Most information given here is applicable only to Windows XP and possibly newer versions of Windows (though I am not […]

If you’re ever out of ideas for new projects/things to research, you might find these topics interesting : Arithmetic coding/compression Many compression algorithms, such as Huffman, work by assigning codes to chunks of data and then writing those codes to output file. Chunks that are often encountered get short codes, rare chunks get longer codes, […]