Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
This site had 29,548 visits in January 2023 from 19,393 unique visitors.
The list below is of document pages that were each viewed at least 100 times in the month. Ranks in parentheses are from December 2022. Faded titles are just index pages which I presume are viewed only or mainly on the way to others, especially while moving from one Table of Contents (TOC) to another. One of those index pages is just the skimpiest of placeholders, pending my writing an introduction, which I likely never will get round to. The TOCs are omitted entirely, as is the banner page, since none of these are meant to be seen independently of a document page.
Standing out this month is that many more readers than I’d have thought possible—or could it be one, over and over—trawled through the site’s oldest pages. Seriously, 319 visits to a page from 1997 about a Windows 95 program! The page has all the look of having been rushed just so that the site in July 1997 had a few pages that weren’t just cobbled together from material first published elsewhere.
Even older, though only by a couple of months, is a page about patching a Microsoft executable to avoid a page fault caused by a double free. I’m glad to have it brought back to mind by its mysteriously attracting 131 visits. My take-away is that it shows from the start that I never had the mind of a security researcher. These days any reverse engineer who comes across a double free sees a possible security vulnerability and wonders about the possibilities for exploitation. Reverse engineering didn’t turn out like I ever imagined it.
Also old are the pages from 2008 and 2009 about bugs in Expression Web. Two make the arbitrary cut-off of 100 visits, but another two didn’t miss by much. The pages are nothing but bug reports, uninvestigated but not undisciplined. Plainly I was on a mission to demonstrate just how ridiculously easy it was to get comically bad misbehaviour from this program. And yet the thing was getting seemingly no end of favourable reviews! I see there the seeds of my growing disenchantment with Windows, just in my capacity as a computer user.
Rather more gratifying are the 220 visits that mark the first appearance in these lists of a page that my recent fling with retro-computing produced about Windows/386—yes, from 1987—as the multi-tasking DOS that many were clamouring for. There is the anti-trust case that should have been but never was. In DOS, Microsoft had monopoly power. For Windows, it had competition. Microsoft tied improved DOS functionality into Windows to give it an anti-competitive boost, all based on knowledge not disclosed to the competitors. I don’t say we’re not all better off in our everyday computing experience for Microsoft’s having made a path for the mass market, but the methods of it were suspect.
The 165 visits to a recent page on running the Windows 3.1 GUI in a Windows 95 virtual machine—or, with suprisingly little trickery—in a Windows 3.1 virtual machine remind me that I really ought to finish that page.