URL Me, Baby!
Good news: I have finally managed to procure a real URL for this blog:
www.kernelmustard.com, active as of this morning. I'm very excited - I was getting tired of spelling out "msmvps.com" for people. You'd be surprised how easy it is to screw that up. Anyway, tell your friends, tell your colleagues, tell your co-workers - kernelmustard.com is ready for prime time!
Raymond Chen had a really interesting article on The Old New Thing today about alignment on 64-bit platforms. Worth a read if you're not used to that sort of thing. I actually posted a little preview of a marshalling discussion as well, which is relevant to kernel-mode people.
Continuing vaguely along the theme from yesterday, I thought I'd plug a book that I refer to often when I have to work on Actual Hardware:
Developing Windows NT Device Drivers: A Programmer's Handbook
by Edward N. Dekker, Joseph M. Newcomer
Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.; ISBN: 0201695901
This is an oldie but a goodie. It's written for Windows NT 4.0, but it's still quite relevant in a couple of ways. In particular, it has some of the best hardware interfacing material I've ever encountered. Some of it is old now (i.e. the Hal calls, the DMA calls, etc.), but the concepts are there, and that's what's important. Also, Ed Dekker is a walking repository of Bad Hardware Stories, some of which come through in the book.
It's not current at all when it comes to things like PnP and power management, but the rest of the concepts are still just about right-on. When you read it in the right light, it's a valuable resource. It's hardbound and printed on nice paper, with a great index - all features that make it actually usable for a practicing programmer.
Anyway, next time you feel the urge to expand your brain, put on some ben folds music, grab Developing Windows NT Device Drivers, and reminisce about the time you got your new Pentium Pro server with 48MB RAM and installed NT4 for the first time. :-)