Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
Collecting old notes and writing new ones on memory management, as started for October, does remain a goal. But it’s only inevitable that I have given in to some distractions as welcome—aside from those of real life which mostly have been very unwelcome. I have seen the dark side of the electricity company treating the supply of gas as an offer I can’t refuse or which they at least make difficult to refuse. When I see the hit to my productivity as I’ve been progressively worn down, I can’t help but wonder what economic activity is wasted through all of our society when our basic utilities aren’t, well, basic utilities. But that’s another story!
My distraction at the start of this month is that I looked again at my attempt from October 2016 at setting up an ongoing project of documenting the native API functions that get and set system information. I always accepted that the functions and their numerous information classes and relevant structures for the information make so large a topic that whatever I write will never be more than a work in progress. Yet I never did get back to it to make any progress! I’ve now updated some pages to account for the surprisingly many information classes that Microsoft has added since the original Windows 10—well, up to and including the 1803 release, which is as far as I have yet prepared for detailed study of anything for this website. For archaeologists, I have finally made a point of looking through the numerous old versions to determine which information classes are valid in which versions. This had the interesting side-effect of finding that information classes and relevant structures have come and gone like evolutionary dead ends. For who knows what reason, I’m drawn to memorialising them.